Oscar-Nominated DP Luke Geissbühler on Using Cquence to Collaborate With a Small Team
April 20, 2021 ~3 min read
Isn’t creating video with your team really hard? Not anymore. Cquence empowers teams to collaborate during the first half of the video creation workflow.
Recently, I (virtually) sat down with Oscar-nominated DP Luke Geissbühler (Borat 1 & 2, Fahrenheit 11/9) and award-winning filmmaker and editor Julie Deffet who collaborated via Cquence for a high-profile client.
Want to join Julie and Luke to easily collaborate in your video workflow? Sign up for Cquence today.
"Being deep in the edit, we save hours - if not days of work - by using Cquence to find both pieces of script and b-roll footage."
Q: What was the dynamic like between you and your client?
Luke: We’re working with this client. There’s a whole team — 3 creatives and a producer. They sit between us and their ultimate client, taking what Julie and I are working on to send off for feedback and approval.
Julie: There’s a logical sequence to edit something. And then it gets turned on its head a little bit when it goes back and forth and there’s notes from above that come down. We have to reorder things.
Luke: You make an edit based on educated guesses — then you see it and you have a reaction. You adjust this or go back and forth on that. This is where Cquence worked really well.
Q: Can you describe your collaborative workflow?
Julie: We deliver the transcription and create a paper edit first.
Luke: Just the script.
Julie: We get the paper edit down as quickly as possible, find the b-roll using Cquence, do a pretty decent first draft, and send it to our client.
Luke: This fits really nicely in our Cquence workflow because we can create the script on “paper” then drag the best moments into Cquence’s assembly timeline.
Julie: We create these rough assemblies and shoot them off to Adobe Premiere. For example, we got feedback from the client asking “do you have more shots where a kid is playing?” and we were each able to quickly search Cquence and find those moments.
Luke: We have so much footage.
Julie: Being deep in the edit, we save hours — if not days of work — by using Cquence to find both pieces of script and b-roll footage.
"We were each able to quickly search Cquence and find those moments."
Q: Anything surprising in your workflow for this project?
Luke: Even though it’s a documentary piece, we write a hypothetical script before we even shoot. We do an initial phone-interview to get a general sense of our subjects. At first, I resisted this. I felt like it was putting words in people’s mouths — but then I embraced it because I left the story open-ended and based on their interviews. Ultimately, it really helped create a comprehensive shot list to tell a compelling story to fall back on. I was wearing several hats on set — directing, DP’ing, producing — so a good shot list was critical. After we finished filming I could hand that “script” over to Julie and we discussed what the intention was, what worked, what didn’t, and adjusted from there.
Julie: When Luke handed off the boatload of footage, the shot list was incredibly helpful for me too so I can quickly search for the best moments I knew he got.
Luke: We shot a lot of this project in Cambodia and it’s such an interesting place with a lot of different aspects. We didn’t know how the original script was going to flesh out. Our client can drill down into a specific storyline that popped up — we’re very lucky to have Cquence to find the material for the client within the sea of footage that we have.
Julie: The classic ask from a client is “Do you have an alternative to that shot?”. Cquence let’s me find something super specific really quickly so I don’t have to go back and look at the whole world of footage again just to find that one moment that would be good, you know?