"My Home Base" — Air National Guard × GSD&M

Setup
When GSD&M set out to show prospective recruits what life actually looks like on an Air National Guard base, the Austin agency brought in Camlock Films as its director-producer team. As an Austin video production company, we'd already spent several years as a recruitment production partner on the Air Force's "Job Fit" series — a sprawling library of short-form videos profiling nearly every job in the branch. "My Home Base" was the more creative follow-up: an MTV Cribs–style tour of base life, hosted by the airmen who live it, built to make a recruiting decision feel personal rather than procedural.

Challenge & approach
GSD&M owned the creative; our job was to make it real on the ground at two very different installations — one in Oxnard, California, the other in Phoenix, Arizona — each guided by a single airman host or hostess. The format only works if the host feels like a genuine, comfortable guide, so before either shoot we ran pre-interviews with both airmen to find their personalities and pin down which corners of the base would actually carry a story. That same prep doubled as a B-roll scout: figuring out, against a single locked shoot day per base, exactly what hardware and locations we could realistically capture and what we couldn't.

Execution
We shot two-camera on ARRI Alexa Minis with Fujinon zoom lenses, flying our core team — co-director and co-owner Morgan Grisham, producer Buttons Pham, and the agency — into each city and staffing up with local crew in both. Shooting on a military base is its own discipline: every crew member needs a background check and a full-day chaperone, and every position has to be choreographed minute-to-minute for national security, all while you're surrounded by aircraft and equipment worth millions. Drone added another layer — airspace near a base is completely off-limits, as is the airspace over nearby national parks, so legal, licensed aerial B-roll meant knowing precisely where we could and couldn't fly, knowledge earned on prior shoots. Oxnard threw in a curveball too: a last-minute reschedule around a freak blizzard, the first the area had seen in roughly 75 years.

Results & close
We delivered six videos in all — a 10-minute long-form tour plus :30 and :15 cutdowns for each base — with the hero pieces living on YouTube and the cutdowns running as paid online ads, edited by BLK Market Media. Threading high-security logistics, multi-city travel, and a creative host-led format into a clean shoot is the kind of work that makes Camlock Films a dependable production partner for agencies bringing ambitious ideas to demanding environments.