Cayla Craft

For those that have been following our blog you know that our job allows us to meet a lot of interesting people in a lot of exciting locations. One of our recent assignments took us to Bakersfield, California to meet with a very enterprising young couple who were interested in having a new lifestyle video shot.
Cayla and Chase Craft are independent distributers for Isagenix International, a very popular and successful marketing company for dietary supplements and personal care products. They explained that they needed to replace their current marketing video with one that more precisely reflects their personality, authenticity and success story. Apparently the production company that produced their initial video failed in all respects and left them very disappointing and dissatisfied.
We planned to shoot the video footage we would need in two locations and all in one day so as to inconvenience the Crafts as little as possible. We arrived first in Bakersfield early in the morning and introduced ourselves to Cayla, Chase and their two beautiful children at their home located on a 5 acre lot in the middle of farm equestrian land. Quite a contrast to the numerous oil wells and pumps just a few miles away. With a lot of distance to travel in one day we immediately went to work. While I interviewed the Crafts to learn more about exactly what they wanted to see in their video, Cache and Carrick went about preparing the location we shoot in while Steele filmed some B-Roll footage around their home and property.
During my interview I learned that Cayla was once a registered nurse while Chase was employed as painter where he would scale the huge oil wells to paint and repair them. The Chase’s have since left those jobs and are now at home full time with their children while managing their ever growing distributorship with Isagenix.
With the easy part of the video work completed it was time to drive the 122 miles to Pismo Beach where we would film the rest of the footage we would need to complete the project to the client’s satisfaction. It’s at Pismo Beach where the Crafts often come to relax and enjoy the California sun and sand. It was very evident to me that this little stretch of beach is clearly their home away from home and the families fun get-a-way spot just by the way they lit up getting out of the car. It was truly a beautiful spot and I can see from the looks of my crew that it wouldn’t take much to turn them from a highly effective film crew into a bunch of beach-bums in no time at all. With the day wearing on and more work to do it was time to crack the whip and get back on task.
I decided that this location would be a perfect opportunity to get some magnificent aerial footage using our state of the art U.A.V. (drone) and capture the surrounding beauty of the area, complete with pounding surf and blue skies. While Cache and I set up the drone, Chase produced a guitar from the back of the car along with plastic buckets and shovels and the family hit the sand.
It’s here that I confirmed a previous suspicion. That dogs either really hate drones or they really love them, from out of nowhere no sooner had the props wound up to full speed did we had a pack of them all looking to catch and eat this valuable piece of equipment. Although fast and nimble, none of them had mastered the art of flying yet so as the U.A.V. took off, so did the dogs.
Shooting outdoors is always a blast for my crew and I and it always presents certain challenges that over the years we have learned to prepare for and overcome. One of them is never leave Steele near an unattended guitar because he’ll quickly pick it up and put the camera down, and the other is whenever we are shooting at the beach be sure to always have a bag of French Fries in the kit bag to keep the local Seagull population busy and away from the mics.
Being satisfied that we had some great video ‘safe in the tin’ it was time to call it a day. With the orange sun setting in our rear window and the open road unfolding in the windshield we started our 400 mile journey back home.