Ba5 at Macaulay Motors: filming the Queenstown Business Chamber night in Frankton

On Wednesday 7 October the Queenstown Business Chamber of Commerce held its monthly Ba5 at Macaulay Motors, the Ford and Mazda dealership at Five Mile in Frankton. We were there with a camera, and by the end of the night the showroom was full: business owners, chamber members and the Macaulay team, catching up between the Fords and Mazdas.

We were there because of an invite. Ella Gorton, Vehicle Sales and Finance Specialist at Macaulay Motors, is a fellow member of our BNI chapter, BNI Summit Queenstown, and asked us along to film the night. This is what Ba5 is, what we shot and how the reel came together.

What Ba5 is

Ba5 is short for Business after Five. The Chamber runs one every month as a relaxed way for members to meet over a glass of wine after work. Each one is hosted by a member business, which gets the evening to show the room who they are and what they do. That makes it a good night to film: a host with something to show off, a room full of local business people, and a few short speeches that tell the story.

October's host was Macaulay Motors. The company dates back to 1935 in Invercargill and started in Queenstown in 1990 as a service operation. In the speeches the team told how it grew from a garage in town to a workshop on Glenda Drive, and then outgrew that too, before the Five Mile dealership opened in December 2018.

The night

Macaulay put out a red carpet from the car park to the showroom doors, with Queenstown Business flags either side. Inside there were name badges at the door, wine, beer and bubbles at the bar, platters, and a lot of people who already knew each other. The view helped too, with snow still on the mountains behind the car park.

The speeches were short and good fun. After the Chamber's welcome, the Macaulay team gave a quick history of the business, then handed over to Ella and her colleague Alfie Camponi, who hosted the rest as a double act. As Alfie put it: "Tonight is about getting people together, meeting local businesses, having a drink and having a laugh, and hopefully making a few new connections." Their "hands up if you've already had a drink tonight" got a big laugh and a lot of hands.

How we filmed it

We shot on our Sony FX30, held vertically in 4K, so the reel plays at full resolution on Instagram and Facebook instead of being cropped from a wide frame. We filmed in the camera's log profile, which keeps detail in a bright window and a dark suit in the same shot. That mattered here, because the showroom is lined with glass and it was a grey evening outside.

Over the evening that came to almost a hundred clips: the arrivals and the building first, then the bar and the room filling up, then the speeches, then the crowd spilling outside with the mountains behind. Covering a networking event is mostly about faces. We kept moving through the room for the laughs, the handshakes and the hugs, which say more about a night like this than any wide shot.

The reel

The reel at the top of this page is just under a minute long, cut on the beat of an upbeat track. Under the music, a few lines from the speeches carry the story in the hosts' own words, so the reel explains the night without any captions. We had the first cut ready the next day.

The polish took a few more passes, mostly on the colour. We graded the footage from log with separate treatments inside and out: the showroom and its mixed light needed one look, and the overcast exteriors needed their colour brought back without blowing out the sky. Macaulay Motors then shared the reel on Instagram as a collab with us.

Hosting a Ba5? A few things that help

If your business has a Ba5 or a similar evening coming up, these are the things that make the video work:

• Get the speeches clean. A short line from a speech does more than any caption, but only if it can be heard over a busy room. Tell your videographer where the microphone and speakers will be.
• Brand the arrival. A red carpet, flags or a sign at the door gives the reel an opening shot and tells viewers whose night it is.
• Shoot vertical for the socials. If the main place it will be seen is Instagram or Facebook, film it that way rather than cropping a wide frame later.
• Post it while people are still talking about it. The guests will share it in the days after. A reel that arrives two weeks later misses that.

Our event video checklist covers the planning in more detail.

Thanks

Thanks to Ella for the invite, to Alfie and the whole Macaulay Motors team for hosting, and to the Queenstown Business Chamber of Commerce for running Ba5. It was a great night.

We film events and social media reels right around Queenstown. If you have an evening, launch or open day coming up, tell us about it.