Digital Video magazine — June 2012
‘Push Girls:’ Shooting the Sundance Channel Series with Panasonic’s AJ-HDX900

Sundance Channel brings an unfettered, uncensored glimpse at what it means to be sexy, ambitious and living with paralysis in Hollywood with Push Girls, a new nonfiction series from producer Gay Rosenthal (Behind the Music, Ruby and Little People, Big World). The 14-episode half-hour docu-series premieres June 4, tracing the lives of four dynamic, outspoken and beautiful women who, by accident or illness, have been paralyzed from the neck or the waist down.

Jen Lane, show runner and producer for the series, comes with a long list of documentary and reality TV credits earned during her 25-year career, including PBS’s American Masters, Joe Millionaire, The Osbournes and Laguna Beach. Lane was enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with Push Girls DP Jennifer Morton, whose resume as a reality denizen includes Project Runway, The Real Housewives of DC and reality classic Flavor of Love. “The reason she appealed to me the most was because she initially started with MTV’s True Life, which was an incredible series, a real way to get back and observe and all of those things that I love about documentaries,” Lane says of the collaboration.

With one of the subjects, Angela, traveling to her home town to celebrate her 10-year high school reunion, which coincided with the 11-year anniversary of the accident that left her paralyzed, production on Push Girls began almost immediately once the series was ordered. Using Panasonic AJ-HDX900 cameras, the production team opted to record to tape in order to leverage the post production infrastructure already in place at Gay Rosenthal Productions.

“It became the right technological choice for us,” comments Lane, who has been with the company since beginning the series just over a year ago. “We would come back to our production offices at GRP and turn over our tapes over to our night AE, who would digitize and group them for editing on the Avid Unity system. These guys are amazing. I’ll arrive in the morning and it’s like, ‘What? The footage from yesterday is in already?’ It’s just awesome, and anybody has access to all footage for any project they’re doing.” (Read full story…)