Day 4 was great! You probably can't make out the backdrop of this location, but we are in fact in a media booth above a baseball stadium. Now you're probably wondering, why on earth would we be conducting a hockey documentary interview in a baseball stadium? Well, the person we interviewed was Bryan Graham (pictured below) and he's one of the co-owners of Thunder Bay's baseball team. And his connection to our story is that he was a radio announcer back in 91/92 covering the Thunder Bay Thunder Hawks. He had some great insights to the team and what it meant to Thunder Bay. So that's why we thought shooting in a media booth actually made sense. 

Another day in the books! This past weekend we had the chance to sit down with Bryan Wyatt. Bryan was part of the media who reported on the 91/92 Thunder Bay Thunder Hawks and had a great perspective on what the team meant to the city, and also, told a unique story about an experience he had with the Colonial Cup! Below are some images of our latest shoot.

Yesterday evening we filmed our first interview for CUP CONFIDENTIAL at the Northwestern Ontario Sports Hall of Fame in Thunder Bay. It's a wonderful place to relive and educate yourself about the very strong sports history this whole region has. Diane Imrie was our interview and was extremely knowledgeable about both the 91/92 Thunder Bay Thunder Hawks team and the whole Colonial Cup story. Below is the only photo we took of the shoot, my apologies, but because this was our first interview we were all extremely busy doing other behind-the-scenes things.

One great thing about using the Fujifilm XT-3 for filmmaking is its tiny size and weight. Part of that is due to the fact that the cameras lenses are extremely compact. Below are three of the main lenses we'll be using to film various aspects of CUP CONFIDENTIAL, each having its own benefit.

The 16mm, for example, is an excellent wide angle lens, though it's not overly fast with an aperture of just f/2.8 wide open. This lens will mainly be used for establishing and scenic outdoor shots. The 50mm will be the workhorse of this production, it'll be used for both interior interviews on a tripod as well as some exterior b-roll scenes. This lens will give us some really nice depth-of-field when chatting with people too. And finally, the 18-55mm is a great run-and-gun lens as it has internal image stabilization with a various  aperture of f/2.8-4. ​

Combined with an assortment of filters, these lightweight lenses are wonderful pieces of glass and will help give the film the look we're going for.

Well we're underway! That's right, over the weekend we went out to capture some b-roll footage for CUP CONFIDENTIAL. To those not familiar with what b-roll is, basically it's the shots you see overtop of the 'talking heads' in documentaries. These can often be location shots, scenic shots, action shots, product shots, you get the idea. For the most part, filmmakers require TONS of b-roll footage because adding it to documentaries makes them far more interesting. Below are a few locations we shot at around Thunder Bay. 

Even though we're months away from editing CUP CONFIDENTIAL, we thought we'd share with you some of our post-production tech. Below is an image of the eGPU we'll be using in conjuction with Final Cut Pro X on the Mac. The eGPU housing unit is from Razer and is the 'Core X' Thunderbolt 3 and the thingy with three fans is the actual graphics card. The graphics card we chose is the ASUS Radeon Vega 64 which is extremely powerful, hence its size, and the fact there are three fans used to cool it. This is by far enough power to help us push through editing. 

Well, after a lot of testing and much consideration we've finally decided which camera we're going to use to film CUP CONFIDENTIAL. Below, is the highly capable ​​Fujifilm XT-3! Don't let its size fool you, this thing is a BEAST with the ability to shoot 4K internally on SD card at 10-bit, 4-2-0, 400mbps and even up to 120fps at 1080p! We also have some great lenses and after reviewing some test footage we shot with it, we know one thing is for sure... the movie will look spectacular! 

We're glad you found us! Since a lot goes into making movies, we hope to update this blog with interesting stuff throughout the whole production process. Think of this blog as a portal into the making-of CUP CONFIDENTIAL so please keep checking back often. So you know, things are coming together quite nicely and we're really excited to get going!

​-The CUP CONFIDENTIAL Team