The more and more films I make the more and more I realize that gear you have is the most and least important thing you have as a filmmaker. It is a terrible dichotomy that we always here in things like, “well he shoots on a RED so, he must know what he is doing” and “it doesn’t matter what you have – film on your parents old VHS camcorder.” The fact of the matter is that the gear you use are your tools and you need to use the best tools you have access to that fit your project the most.

While in pre-production for Llama Nation the director and producers talked about what gear to use. We had access to DSLRS, C100s, RED Scarlet and Epic, and a few other cameras. When it came to audio choices we had the same amount of choices and varying ways to record audio.

In the end we settled on using two C100s as our primary cameras and brought along DSLRs just in case and a GoPro to get POV shots of the Llamas. The C100 has an amazing image quality and is very portable.

For audio – we settled on the Rode NTG2 and the Sennheiser G3. We also decide to forgo a separate audio recorder and recorded the audio straight into the C100. We wanted to keeps things as simple as possible so it didn’t slow us down when we were shooting run and gun.

That is what we went with, but what you need for your documentary or short film could be completely different. In these videos Lars Lindstrom (the DP of Llama Nation) goes over why we went with both the cameras and audio set up that we did.