We had a cool opportunity come up to shoot with fortune.com in the ever-growing New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins Colorado. New Belgium’s operation started in a basement with just a few machines, and now has scaled to over a business generating $190 million (in 2013). Their current setup is amazing, some days they’ll produce 250,000 bottles or more. Needless to say, automation, factories, and the Red Epic camera were a formula for some killer footage.
The primary goal of the shoot was to tell the origin of the Brewery from the perspective of CEO Kim Jordan. The tricky part was that all of this incredible backdrop of a massive working brewery was very noisy. I would love to have had the ability to shut operations down for 1 hour to do a quiet interview in one of the big open brewing areas… but that would be prohibitively expensive and not realistic. We chose to do the interview in Kim’s office where sound was easily controllable and just nail it with all of the b-roll footage.
We only had a half day of access to the facility, so we had to run light and small. I’m grateful to have had the talented Ian Chisolm along to help move gear for dolly setups and lights, when time was crunched!
Video will be posted soon as it is released.
