Award-winning filmmaker, documentarian and producer Lesley Chilcott moves quickly and easily between shooting/directing product commercials to hard-hitting, visual storytelling documentaries.
To support her documentary projects, Chilcott has gained a strong reputation as an advertising short project producer. In a recent two-week period, she shot a Gatorade project in Florida and a Dove Chocolate piece in Baltimore but still had time to work on her latest documentary, which she is keeping tightly under wraps.
Because Chilcott needs to move quickly from one project to another, she uses OWC Envoy Pro EX SSDs, external drives that provide speed, portability and durability – all features that are important to her as a filmmaker. Weighing only 3.8 ounces and measuring just 0.4 inches thick, 2.1 inches wide and 4.5 inches long, the Envoy Pro EX is exceptionally portable.
“I can fit four in my backpack without noticing the weight,” she noted. “And they don’t look big and clunky like some of the other storage devices I’ve had. They’re like the films I like to produce … well-designed.”
She still enjoys it when people from the camera department or the ad agency ask, “What’s that?” because they’re so surprised that she has 1TB of storage capacity in such a small package and that whether she’s in the field or on set, copying content is very fast.
Chilcott got her start in film and production with MTV Networks and soon after was chosen to be the producer of the 2007 Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, hosted by Al Gore.
After completing the film, which has since become a rallying cry to the deepening global climate crisis for environmentalists around the world; she produced a widely acclaimed documentary, It Might Get Loud, about legendary guitarists The Edge, Jimmy Page and Jack White.
Other notable Chilcott-produced films include A Mother’s Promise, a Barack Obama biographic film for the Democratic National Convention and Waiting for Superman, which earned her a win by the PGA (Producers Guild of America) for outstanding producer of theatrical documentary.
Her short film Code Stars featured tech industry icons such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, the founders of Twitter, Dropbox, Zappos and others. Two days after its release on YouTube, it had garnered over 20 million views and was the number one video on the site for a number of days.
The technology documentary led her to produce another widely recognized documentary, Codegirl.
The film follows the annual Technovation Challenge where female high school students compete to design apps that solve problems in their communities.
She filmed teams in Moldova, Mexico, Brazil and other countries showing how being exposed to technology and computer science can transform young girls’ lives.
Codegirl was the first movie to premiere exclusively on YouTube before being released to theaters and other outlets around the globe. The movie was also the first to stream on Mashable and was selected for the American Film Showcase, part of the U.S. State Department’s premiere film diplomacy program.
Chilcott was familiar with the industry statistics – women hold 26 percent of technology jobs and more than 80 percent of the application developers are male – which she feels can be changed once females understand that programming and coding is something they can embrace because of their attention to detail.
“I saw a lot of light bulb moments firsthand,” Chilcott commented. “For these girls, it’s about how their lives were affected. And more importantly, how visual storytelling can help more of them reach their full potential.”
With video game industry statistics showing that 50 percent of today’s gamers are female, Chilcott feels there is a natural path between gaming and coding for females.
Today, when she isn’t shooting ads, Chilcott is busy working on another documentary project that she is keeping very hush-hush. The project, which is another film she hopes to complete by the end of the year, includes a complex story and a wide range of international locations.
Chilcott notes that she likes having a solid state drive in the field because when you’re shooting, everything is on-the-clock and seems like controlled chaos to people unfamiliar with the work being done.
“Everyone is very busy rushing to get the project done right as quickly as possible,” she explained. “It’s an unstable environment and it’s nice to know my storage is very stable. You just don’t have to think about the worst case scenario – reshooting.”
She usually carries the storage units in her backpack when traveling to ensure they don’t get lost or damaged and that she’s always ready if a great interview opportunity comes up.
Whether Chilcott is on location or at her home workflow station, she always seems to be on a tight time budget with a lot of critical constraints on shooting, capturing, moving and saving the video content. For her, storage simply can’t fail, even when it is mishandled.
For today’s filmmaker, there’s only time to do it right once.
Learn more about the OWC Envoy Pro EX solution here: eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-drives/OWC-Envoy-Pro
