What’s in my bag.
What’s in My Bag spotlights the setups that help create the stories of our times. This regular column offers a peek into the technical and philosophical underpinnings of some of the most important crew on documentaries—camera and sound people and editors.
I’m an owner-operator, so for better or worse, I’m almost always shooting with what you see here. Whether as part of a run-and-gun skeleton crew embedding with agents freeing American hostages abroad or as part of a large crew on stages for Quiet on Set, I’ll show up with these same items every single time.
Sometimes it’s a lot more than this, but this is sort of the bare-bones minimum. Plus a Pelican case full of batteries. In total, when all packed away, this gear takes up four Pelican cases. That’s four relatively large and heavy cases that I have to schlep from home, into a car, through the airport, into another car, and then squeeze into a hotel room, enduring more than a few “Traveling light, huh? LOL!” comments throughout the day.
And more often, it’s seven or eight cases plus the true unsung hero of this whole operation, the Kartmaster HD 500 collapsible cart. I could spend this whole piece singing the praises of that cart. On the road, it is my best friend, my number one helper, my road dog.
It wasn’t always like this. When I was in my 20s, shooting for Fault Lines and Explorer, I prided myself on fitting everything into one single carry-on size Pelican and one duffel bag. Because it was just me and a producer, everything had to be as efficient as possible. I was shooting on a C300 and running sound right off of the camera’s XLR inputs. Those were the days of no rig and shooting almost everything on a little Canon still lens. We went all over the world like that.
Bit by bit, I would upgrade this and that—trading G3 lavs for the Lectros, a Zoom recorder for a Mixpre, the Canon lens for CP3s, and then for this Optimo zoom—and there was also an explosion of cases when I traded up to the Alexa Mini. Eventually, I ended up with this hot mess in front of you.
The no-rig days are definitely behind me now, but the same shooting style and gear philosophy I was working with then still applies today. Every single item is optimized for a one-person-band workflow on set. All of this stuff can be worn by one person (plus a director taking the wireless video + IFB). And yes, there is a rig, but it’s not an Easyrig. The somewhat unconventional placement of the right handgrip on the Mini (the Arri MRW-1 Master Grip) is inspired by the no-rig handgrip placement of the original Canon C300. My shoulder pad of choice is still the same as 10 years ago (a piece of Pelican divider foam velcroed to the bottom of the camera). And the Cheez-Its are the same, of course: original flavor.
Image Annotations:
- Arri Alexa Mini
- Angenieux Optimo 28-76 lens
- Arri Cforce Mini Motors Master Grip, OCU-1
- Sound belt with MixPre-6 and Lectrosonic LRs
- Lectrosonic LTs
- Sanken COS-11D, DPA 6060
- Wireless SmallHD Cine 7 director’s monitor
- Lectrosonic M2Ra IFB
- Leica M6 stills camera, Summicron 28, 50 lenses
- Kodak Portra 800 35mm film
- Pelican divider/shoulder pad
- Glyph 4TB Atom SSD
- Cap-It! medium and small bags (for rain)
- AsteraBox CRMX transmitter
- Advil, Zyrtec
- Bubblebee Industries lav concealer tape
- Arri Rota Pola, Hollywood Black Magic filters
- Portable speaker (for intv setup vibes)
Victor Tadashi Suárez is a cinematographer and filmmaker in Los Angeles, working in nonfiction and commercial. He’s the winner of two Emmys and most recently was the DP for the series Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, Nesa Azimi’s Driver, and JoeBill Muñoz and Lucas Guilkey’s The Strike. He is known for his work on the FX/Hulu series The New York Times Presents, the ESPN 30 for 30 feature Infinite Race, and the PBS FRONTLINE film COVID’s Hidden Toll. Previously he spent six years as the DP for the flagship Al Jazeera English series Fault Lines, for which he filmed 45 half-hour films and was nominated for seven Emmys. He studied economics-philosophy and history at Columbia University in NYC.