At the moment we stepped into ELY’s corporate office, this project was a complete unknown. At first, we were asked to give a quote for the cheapest price we could give to make a video.

After sitting down to meet with Sean Ely (the owner) however, it quickly became apparent that Sean was creative. We asked him, “you’ve been thinking about a much larger video project for some time now haven’t you?” He affirmed our suspicion, and then the pre-production process began with a whiteboard and some markers.

It really should be this simple.

He explained the way his company operates and how his processes and various entities make ELY so unique. We developed of a plan which would take our production crew to two primary shooting locations in order to capture ELY’s process from sand-mining to full concrete construction. The bulk majority of the shots would need to be captured with our Mavic 2 Pro over ELY’s gigantic sand mine in Junction City, GA and over a high rise building construction in Greenville, SC.

In Junction City, our crew would need to arrive onsite at Southern Mining Corporation at 1:30 AM to begin setting up the most challenging shoot we’ve ever done. With a production truck full of high-end digital cinema equipment, lights, generators, c-stands, blankets, etc…..we were able to set the shot in the middle of a sand mine. There was sand literally everywhere, and our task was to prevent any of it from making its way into our cameras, lenses, and other equipment.

Utilizing the Mavic 2 drone, Arri Alexa Mini and Blackmagic 4K cameras with Cooke lenses along with a full Jib setup, we were able to capture an opening sequence that was envisioned in that first creative meeting at ELY’s corporate office.

The second shoot would find us in downtown Greenville, SC where ELY’s team would lay concrete on the 15th floor of a high-rise building construction. The task was to capture cinematic footage of the workers with our Arri Alexa camera while also flying our Mavic 2 around the building shooting from a unique aerial perspective. A particularly amazing shot followed a load hooked to a crane from ground-level all the way up to it’s delivery on the 15th floor over downtown Greenville.

After post-production was complete and the final video delivered to our client, the ELY team expressed great enthusiasm over how well the video was made. Set to the song “Hard Livin'” by Chris Stapleton, the images move fast and electric while capturing the ELY brand in a way only IE Studios can.