From Portsmouth To Panama

At Southpoint Films we’ll travel anywhere, from Portsmouth to Panama, to make great video.

If you were to look at the Southpoint Films website, you’d probably think that we only operated in Southampton, Portsmouth, Bournemouth and London. But did you know that we regularly go further afield to produce great videos for our customers?

Over the past couple of years, myself and my colleagues have had the pleasure of travelling to Wolverhampton, Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Paris, Toulouse, Marseille, Switzerland, Poland and Panama in the name of Southpoint Films. We’ve filmed in all kinds of locations too, including factories that manufacture cleaning equipment to car engines, and at global conferences for industries such as major project management.

Recently I was fortunate enough to be taken on a trip to Panama by our client The PM Channel to film the IPMA (International Project Management Association) World Congress conference. The three day event saw delegates flying in from all over the globe to learn more about their industry, plus the arts and sciences of how to manage major projects.

By filming at this event we were able to capture the knowledge that was shared for the benefit of the thousands of practising project managers who were unable to attend in person, allowing them to gain knowledge without having to commit to the expense of flying to an exotic location, paying for accommodation, and giving up time away from their businesses and families.

From our client’s perspective, by using the same production company as they use at home, we were able to ensure that the content, quality and delivery was consistent with the other videos that we’ve produced for them in the past. There was very little risk when it came to the output of the filming, which isn’t always the case when you outsource to a local and unfamiliar crew. (Especially in places where there may be a language barrier.)

The only downside to bringing a crew with you on an overseas project is cost. Or at least, the perception is that travelling with camera equipment is costly. While you can’t completely avoid plane, train or other transport fees, we’ve deliberately made sure that all of our core equipment is easily transportable.

This means that we can take our equipment on public transport or store it in the cargo hold of a plane without it costing a fortune or getting damaged. For anything bigger we can look at shipping equipment overseas or simply renting locally.

For this particular project, both myself and the client took a total of four bags with us; two bags for personal items which were taken onto the plane, one bag in the hold of the plane for our camera equipment, and a second bag in the hold for a tripod and our client’s roller banners for the exhibition. (Had we been working on a project where we could have used a smaller camera we might have been able to take everything on the plane with us.)

Couple this with the fact that we used public transport to get around and you’ll find that – outside of the two plane tickets – there was very little additional travel cost. The end result was that we were able to capture a great amount of content which will no doubt provide our client and their customers with value for a long time to come.

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A glimpse of the future…?

Maybe in the future all we’ll need is a smartphone to film an event like this? As a challenge, I took a brand new iPhone 6s with me to document my experience in Panama. Check out this highlights video I filmed and edited using it. It’s not bad for a device that fits in your pocket!