An Answer to a prayer
Director Michael Bleiden filmed the Emmy's opening sequence with Jimmy Fallon in the basement of the Nokia Theatre:
"It was like an answer to a prayer. I was shooting with a new Canon XF305 camera with autofocus, on a small Steadicam, without a separate assistant. We only had 4 ½ hours to shoot, so there was no chance for any retakes. It was really mission-critical for us.
We needed a system that would allow everyone to watch the monitor wirelessly. It also needed to be HD so that we could detect focus and small enough for the Steadicam. It had to transmit quite a long way. Everyone said it didn't exist, but we were blown away when we got the Boxx system from Bexel.
The Boxx guys gave us the system and showed us how to use it and it just worked. We were shooting in a maze of corridors and hallways and we were using radio waves. The monitors were hidden. We were 50-60 yards away from the shot and needed to check focus on the monitors all the time. You would not expect that the signal would travel through all that, but the funny thing is that the system actually prefers environments where the signal can reflect off multiple surfaces hence it does very well through corridors and inside buildings.
We would not have had the confidence to attempt this without the Boxx system.
Normally we tape a system to the rig with wires, which can make it unbalanced but the Boxx system mounts so conveniently, it was like it was seamless. Incredible. Boxx gave us the highest quality, covered the greatest distance and was the easiest to mount. The quality was incredible and the video was all uncompressed, so we could even have used what we had recorded."
