Crew, Equipment and Craft
The same crew, and the gear to make any room work.
Every Benchmark Commercials shoot is staffed by the same three-person crew: producer, lead cinematographer and production assistant. Most firms never find out what their video was actually shot on. Here is everything, down to the model.
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A three-person crew comes to you on every shoot: producer, lead cinematographer, production assistant.
The producer and the lead cinematographer are the same two people every single time. Not a bench of freelancers booked against a date. That matters more than any single piece of equipment on this page, because a crew that has worked hundreds of shoot days together can absorb a problem without anyone in your office noticing there was one.
The cinematographer on every shoot
Every Benchmark shoot is led by the same cinematographer. Nikolai has been part of our crew for years, and between us we have filmed dozens of personal injury firms nationwide.
His documentary work has earned ten New York Emmy nominations as director of photography. His own feature documentary, which he directed, shot and edited himself, received an Honorable Mention in the Local Heroes Competition at the Cleveland International Film Festival. Earlier work includes international sports and travel documentary for Nautical Channel, and branded production including American Express.
That is who is setting up in your conference room.
Cameras and lenses
Sony A7S III bodies. We run two at once on interviews, at different focal lengths, so the edit has a wide and a tight of every answer without ever asking anyone to repeat themselves.
Sony glass throughout. The first reason is autofocus, which matters most on B-roll, where a crew is moving and the subject is not holding still. The second is the look. The workhorse is the 50mm f1.2 G Master, then a range for everything else: 24-70, 70-200, 24-105, and others depending on the day.
The f1.2 is not only for interviews. It is what lets us shoot B-roll in a cluttered office and have the clutter disappear.
On top of the glass we run a Pro Mist over a variable ND filter, which is where a lot of the softness in the highlights comes from.
- Recording format. 4K, 24p, 4:2:2 10-bit, which is what makes the color grade hold up.
- A SmallHD Ultra 5 on the A cam, so framing and exposure are decisions rather than accidents. On the gimbal it is an Atomos Shinobi 2, which is the run and gun monitor.
- A Raven Eye feeding an iPad. Every person we interview sees themselves before we hit record and confirms they are happy with how they look. We run the iPad through the whole shoot, so you can watch the thing being made as it happens.
- 4K stills pulled from the graded footage, showing people working and interacting rather than posing. They replace a photoshoot, though they do not replace proper headshots if your firm needs those.
Lighting a law firm office
Benchmark lights a typical interview with four to eight fixtures. This is the part that decides whether your office looks like your office or looks like a film.
- Aputure 600D as the key. Most crews do not bring one. It matters when a room has real windows, because it is powerful enough to match daylight instead of fighting it.
- Light Dome 150 on the key. This is where the softness comes from, and softness is most of what people mean when they say a video looks cinematic.
- Aputure 120D or smaller as fill.
- Amaran Flex for the back light and hair light, on a C-stand on most shoots.
- A high grade RGB light. The most flexible fixture in the kit. Background color, a wash on a wall, a practical that is not really a practical.
- Godox VL200 and VL150 plus small MC lights for lighting the wider space and picking out details.
- Color gels to put color into a background or a corner, chosen to work with what is already in the room.
- A snoot for projecting shapes onto a wall. Most often window blinds, which is the single fastest way to give a flat wall depth.
- Negative fill to take light away where the room is giving us too much.
Between the gels, the snoot and the f1.2, there is no room we cannot turn into something worth looking at. We have worked in offices that were genuinely difficult and the footage always lands.
Audio, and why there is no lavalier
A Rode NTG-3 on a boom stand, recording 32-bit float. The float recording means the audio cannot clip or distort no matter how loud or quiet someone gets, which removes an entire category of shoot-day problem.
No lavalier. Clipping a mic to every person costs time, and people are noticeably more self-conscious once something is attached to them. A boom overhead sounds better anyway.
Movement and aerials
A DJI Ronin gimbal for anything walking, with an Atomos Shinobi 2 on it. A DJI Air 3S with zoom for aerials, and an FPV drone when a shot needs to move through a space rather than over it.
Aerials matter more than they sound. A shot of your building, your street or your city at sunrise tells a prospective client that you are somewhere real and specific, which is most of what local trust is made of. The courthouse is often the strongest one of all, because it puts the firm exactly where a prospective client imagines the fight actually happens.
A frame from a drone pass over a client’s building. Their name is on it, and everyone driving past knows the block.
When a firm has no office
Some firms work remotely. Others have an office they are not confident about.
We only build in a studio when we genuinely cannot find a strategic way to make the space reflect the caliber of the work. Usually we can, and usually we do.
When we cannot, we build the shoot in a studio. We have done it in Los Angeles and in New York. On the Los Angeles build we had a 23,000 square foot space and brought in someone to handle props and staging, down to the case files on the desk, notes on sticky pads, plaques on the wall of the attorney’s office, and the firm’s logo on the reception wall.
It is not a false version of the firm. It is the firm as it actually operates, in a space that finally matches it.
Location and staging support
Whatever a shoot needs that the office cannot provide, we arrange. Studio rental and staging, props where a scene calls for them, certificates of insurance for the building, freight elevator access prepped in advance for getting equipment up to the floor, and permissions for outside locations. None of it appears in the finished video, which is the point.
Cinema is a thousand small decisions arriving at the same time. The gear is one of them.
The edit and the sound
Our editors work on feature films. They cut in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, and the rest of the Adobe suite handles visual effects and anything that has to be built rather than filmed. Color grading is handled properly rather than treated as a filter applied at the end.
Sound is where most legal video quietly gives itself away. Music is not dropped onto a timeline and left there. It gets mixed and manipulated against the voice so the highs land where they should.
Then there is sound design, which is separate work and takes hours. The page turning. The footsteps down a hallway. The door. None of it is noticed by anyone watching, and all of it is the difference between a video that plays and a video that pulls someone in.
Where AI fits, and where it does not
We use AI in post, and we are straight about it. Pulling an extra bit of detail out of a shot. Removing an object that should not be in frame. Repairing a sound problem. Making a flat sky look like the day actually felt. There are dozens of small uses like that.
What we do not do is let it make the video. Everything a viewer is actually responding to, the people, the words, the moments, is real. The second someone starts to sniff AI in a firm’s video, trust is at serious risk of being lost, and trust is the entire product.
In short
The kit
- Sony A7S III bodies, two rolling on every interview
- Sony G Master glass, 50mm f1.2 primary, 24-70, 70-200, 24-105
- 4K, 24p, 4:2:2 10-bit
- Aputure 600D key with Light Dome 150
- Aputure 120D fill, Amaran Flex back light, high grade RGB
- Godox VL200, VL150 and MC lights
- Color gels, snoot, negative fill
- Rode NTG-3 on a boom, 32-bit float, no lav
- DJI Ronin gimbal, DJI Air 3S, FPV drone
- Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, Adobe for visual effects
- In-house color grade and sound design
- Pro Mist over a variable ND, Raven Eye and iPad monitoring
- SmallHD Ultra 5 on the A cam, Atomos Shinobi 2 on the gimbal
- Grip, stands, flags, diffusion, matte boxes, filters, monitors and batteries
This list is current rather than fixed. We add gear on a regular basis, and what turns up at your office is whatever the shoot actually calls for. It arrives in a large SUV, not a truck.
Want to know what this would look like in your office? That is most of what the first call is.
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