Most of the footage had to come from live job sites with real crews on camera, so every shoot day ran on someone else's schedule.
Three of our four shoot days were on live sites run by a contractor Universal works with, one of them at night, starting at 8 PM. The fourth was on the Burnaby street their training academy uses for its on-road practicum, under the academy's city permit. Each location needed its own start time and on-site contact, and any drone shot over an active job had to be cleared before it could go in a video.
We built the shoot around the way the crews already work. When Universal's health and safety team sent us the order they set up a site each day, we reordered that part of the shoot to match, so the cameras caught the job in the order it happens.
Every video had a script and a shot list before a camera came out, and we worked with Universal, the contractor and the training academy to match each shoot day to a real site. We took the staged demonstrations of the wrong technique out of the plan, so the footage shows the job done right. Four shoot days gave Universal ten videos, a photo set and a b-roll library of their own.
