The Orange County based FilmEd Academy of the Arts is an education program that provides high school students with introductory production/post-production training as well as equipment. Every summer, the program hosts free 2-week workshops that teach hundreds of students the basics of directing, cinematography, and editing. The goal is to prepare them for projects during the school year. As early as fourteen or fifteen years old, students are leaving the summer workshops knowing how to handle prosumer cameras like the Panasonic HVX200 and HPX500, how to edit on the latest versions of Final Cut Pro and how to utilize wireless lapel microphones for interviews, etc.
FilmEd also has an advanced course and their camera of choice for the past two years has been the Canon 5D Mark II. Anyone who has worked with these HDSLRs for filmmaking purposes knows that getting these cameras ready for production is a huge headache because of the large amount of extraneous individual parts required to construct a rig.
“Equipment goes through FilmEd so fast that soft cases are not even an option anymore to house our gear due to common wear and tear problems,” says FilmEd instructor, Royce Choi. “But the Zacuto HDSLR gear performed as it was designed with no fret, no damage, and with an ease that made the FilmEd Zacuto rig constantly the most sought piece of equipment by every single student.”
This past year FilmEd decided to expand their inventory available to the Advanced students and purchased all of their HDSLR needs exclusively from Zacuto.
“It really was a no-brainer to pay a slight premium for equipment that was not going to fail, break, or have to be repaired over and over again, “says Choi. “We now have four complete Zacuto rigs for the 5D Mark IIs—fully outfitted handheld rigs with Z-Focuses, EVFs, etc. I am happy to say that, after six weeks of over 240+ hours of nonstop use, the Zacuto gear has held out fantastically without a single hitch.”
The Zacuto HDSLR gear has not only given FilmEd the confidence to hand students thousands of dollars worth of equipment, but it has also changed the entire curriculum. With more advanced gear, they can introduce new concepts to students such as pulling focus on a Z-Focus with a whip or utilizing an EVF’s preset functions to judge the proper exposure and focus of each and every shot.
The student response to the equipment is ecstatic and we know that all four of our Zacuto rigs will be in extremely high demand as students use them for their film festival entries at our annual Orange County Film Festival,” says Choi. “We could not be more excited. Thank you Zacuto for helping us make our advanced production course a reality.
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