Unlock the power of wheels to make your lighting setup easy and portable.
Matthews Mini Boom Rolling Kit 2 Caster Wheels
While we all love to talk about how much of a game-changer AI is going to be in film and video, there’s one tiny innovation from a long time ago that we don’t talk about enough. That’s right—the wheel. Oh man, talk about disruptive innovation! There’s nothing more groundbreaking than the wheel.
All joking aside, for filmmakers and video pros looking to speed up their workflows (and save their backs from extra heavy lifting) adding wheels to pieces of your gear can be a great way to save time and smooth out your production setups.
One of the latest pieces of production gear to get this wheel addition is this new Mini Boom Rolling Kit from Matthews which, when combined with its lockable wheels, an extending C-stand riser, and a positionable boom arm, can be the perfect tool for taking your lighting setup on the go.
Let’s take a look at this new tech innovation and explore if it might be right for you and your production needs.
Sold as a kit that includes plenty of parts, bells, and whistles, this Mini Boom Rolling Kit from Matthews should really be as versatile and easy to use as any C-stand-based lighting setup you might find on the market. But, of course, the key addition is the lockable wheels.
The Mini Boom Rolling Kit comes with the following pieces for your different setups:
As anyone who’s set up a C-stand light for a shot and then had to immediately move it because it was too much in frame can tell you, there are certainly times when you’ll wish for easy movement. With this Mini Boom Rolling kit, you should be able to find comfort in the fact that you’re not alone in this desire.
Now, let’s address some of the obvious (and not so-obvious) pros and cons of a wheeled boom lighting setup.
The pros are all about ease of use and movability. If your light needs to be adjusted a few inches or feet, it can be as easy as unlocking the wheels, moving it over, and locking it back in place.
This Mini Boom Rolling Kit could also be a great addition to any set studio setup where you can set it up once, leave it up, and simply grab it and roll it to wherever you might need it the next time you’re shooting.
However, to work best, a rolling setup like this is going to need smooth and leveling flooring. Something you’ll find on most indoor corporate shoots perhaps, but obviously not what you’re going to get out in the field. And if you’re a true run-and-gun videographer with a completely mobile setup, this might actually end up slowing you down.
The wheels powering the Matthews Mini Boom Rolling Kit
Still, Matthews is a solid brand and this Mini Boom Rolling Kit is made from good materials that should hold up for most small to medium-sized shoots. As long as you’re not dropping thousands of pounds onto the setup you should be able to rest assured that with its steel components and top-grade materials it should do the trick with ease and reliability.
The Matthews Mini Boom Rolling Kit is currently available for pre-order and should be shipping soon.
The Mini Boom Rolling Kit from Matthews which, when combined with its lockable wheels, an extending C-Stand riser, and a positionable boom arm, can be the perfect tool for taking your lighting setup on the go
This post was written by Michael Cooke.
How do you build a huge world on an indie scale? It’s a question I get asked a lot. My short film/pilot presentation, FREEMAN HOSPITALITY, is about a family of African-American gunslingers in a post-apocalyptic dystopian America.
I began working on this script in 2018. From the beginning, the idea was to leave the viewer with the idea that this is a world worth exploring further. The simple truth is that I didn’t realize the scale of it until I stopped and looked back at the project’s journey.
Freeman Hospitality Festival Trailer from Mike Cooke on Vimeo.
The Freemans live in Georgia in 2055 amid the chaos of a failed state. America is crumbling, vast swathes of the South have turned into full-on warzones. In these warzones pop up warlords. What if an ambitious foreign journalist wanted to land the interview of a lifetime? That journalist would need to hire the best protection in the land–the Freemans. Before any mission, you need to plan it. Where could the Freemans plan their mission? At the center, the heartbeat of most family homes, the kitchen. Except on their table isn’t a big Sunday meal, it’s military-grade weapons and holographic maps for survival.
My grandparents have a large ranch-style home on five acres of land. They built it themselves in the small town of Albany, Georgia. Exactly ten minutes away, my uncle has an open field of about 20 acres of land. Those two locations were my settings.
I had meaningful and accessible locations, a story with conflict built around those places, and a universal location to subvert audience expectations. Now how to actually film the project so that it looked like a film I’d want to see.
I'm fortunate enough to own my own camera package, a RED Epic Dragon 6K, so that's what we shot on. Not having to pay for a camera package was a huge chunk out of our budget. This meant that I didn’t have to worry about getting rentals, or extra transport.
We used 100 percent practical lights and natural light which allowed us to move quickly through the Freeman’s house and create a stoic mood for the family.
For our exteriors, we shot in late winter and the southern gods were kind to us. Our exteriors were shot on two consecutive cloudy days, using just some bounce and negative fill.
A large part of the budget was devoted to making sure that I could translate visual history and danger using VFX, firearm training, and good old-fashioned dialogue. Whether it was solar panels on the old family home or war-torn cotton fields on fire, I wanted to accentuate the Freeman’s world.
All of the bullet effects were done in post. As an extra level of safety and on-screen technical proficiency, I hired a tactical trainer and technical advisor Matt Clanton to the team. He taught our actors how to move with firearms, and helped plan our fire and exit scene.
Black people are not monoliths, but large parts of the Black experience are shared, and so I wanted to speak to that in the context of growing up Black in South Georgia but with a science fiction edge.
Freeman Hospitality is meant to be a jumping-off point to this vision.
If you want to get in touch with me, please feel free to drop me a line at @mikecooketv
This post was written by Michael Cooke.
Caster Set Michael Cooke is a multi-hyphenate director, DP, writer, editor, and producer. He has been building a body of work that’s calling on all of these skills to tell complex stories on an indie budget.