One of the things we pride ourselves here at Mill Creek Pictures is the way in which we film. The OLD SKOOL way of filming of anything of quality was to have enormous crews, enormous cameras, enormous trucks and support vehicles. The assumption was that quality meant a large circus in tow. This is true of Hollywood, or New York or LA. WIth the advances in camera equipment in the last ten years the actual requirements of having to lug a film crew around have become almost microscopic.

In the last few years we have begun making a practice of paring our size of crew down with the intent of being able to allocate more of the budget in front of the camera; stuff the viewers and client actually see. Individual crew members must be able to perform more than one task quickly and efficiently. This philosophy has created two interesting side benefits; our productions move very quickly with very little disruption to the area in which we’re filming and our fuel and transport costs became almost minimal.

When we began filming overseas in places like Vietnam and Argentina, this ability became crucial because of the large physical area we had to cover in a short amount of time. At one point, due to traffic in Buenos Aires, the whole crew of 5 ditched the large trucks and jumped into cabs to complete filming. Even then we decided that it was yet quicker to walk through the city with all of our equipment strapped onto back packs.

This past summer, we had the pleasure to film for two cities who were to be showcased for the 2010 Olympics. As it was summer and the budget was somewhat limited, we opted to camp in government campgrounds. This offered us two great advantages again; camping close to our next days location, which was hours out of the city, meant we could catch early morning light to capture the absolute best footage. Our small crew, all of our camp gear and rations, our entire photographic equipment package which included a small crane fit inside a, get this – a 2007 Toyota Yaris. Yes, the cheapest car in Canada with among the most frugal fuel economies was our production vehicle over the course of 16 days filming in the entire of BC.

You can view the completed clips on our samples page

Spirit of BC City of Cranbrook AND Spirit of BC Williams Lake