Three Days on the Water Before the Boat Show

A Director’s Video Plan for Boat Show Season

By Timothy Kline

A boat show opens the buying calendar. A prospect walks dozens of docks, collects brochures and leaves with a short list. The builders and dealers who stay on that list are the ones whose footage reaches the buyer before the show, during it and in the weeks after. That footage is made on the water ahead of time. It drives traffic to the booth and the in-water display, fills the lead list and keeps a boat in mind into the spring selling season.

Here is the three-day plan I use, drawn from filming the Mag Bay 33 on Biscayne Bay, outside Palm Beach and Cocoa Beach, and on Arizona’s Lake Havasu. A builder whose 38 took Best of Show for boats under 60 feet at its 2024 Fort Lauderdale debut walks into every show with a high bar, and the film has to meet it.

Day One: Sunrise, Skyline and Details

We start before the sun. First light on Biscayne Bay flatters a white hull better than any other hour, so we run two boats past the Brickell skyline while the water is glass, then out toward the Cape Florida Lighthouse on Key Biscayne.

By midday the light is overhead, the right time for straight-down aerials. Turquoise and green water frames the hull and shows its lines from sheer to transom.

Then we come back to the dock and slow down. Cinema sliders carry the camera across the helm, the throttles, the fuel manifold and the rigging. Buyers at this level read build quality in the details, so we light them like a product shoot and hold each shot long enough to read.

Day Two: Speed

Day two is about performance. One boat carries the camera, one is the hero, and walkie-talkies connect the two captains so both know exactly where the camera will be before the throttles go down.

This is where the 33 earned its reputation with our crew. On a twin-stepped hull it ran so flat and steady that our aerial work stayed smooth, even on close passes beside the hull at better than 50 mph. A steady boat lets the camera get closer, and closer is what sells speed on a screen.

We launch and recover the drone from the moving camera boat, so no run is lost to a trip back to the dock. Between runs we swap batteries and review the footage on laptops right on the water, then build the next setups around what worked. By the afternoon every pass is sharper than the one before.

Long lenses add scale. From the camera boat, a long lens stacks the hull against the stilt houses of Stiltsville and compresses the distance into one frame. At the launch in Arizona, we go underwater and shoot up at the running surface and the outboards, an angle few people at a show have ever seen.

Day Three: People, Photos and Night

Day three belongs to the people. At yacht and boat shows we record short owner interviews and transcribe every one, so the same words feed the video, magazine features and the print inserts we design. Owners explain why they chose the boat in language no brochure can match.

We photograph the whole boat bow to stern so the stills match the video in light and color, run sunrise and sunset passes for the opening and closing of the show film, then wait for dark. At night the boat’s underwater and accent lighting glows against black water, and those frames are often the ones that stop people at a booth screen.

What You Walk In With

• A hero film for the booth or the in-water display
• Short clips for social posts while the show runs
• Matching photography for the website, press and print
• Owner quotes for features and inserts
• Sunrise and night footage that stands apart on a crowded dock

Everything is shot in 4K and 6K at high frame rates, up to 120 frames per second, on cinema-grade cameras with cinema lenses, then graded to one look so every piece belongs to the same film.

After the Show

Follow up while the show is still fresh. Send each serious prospect a short walkaround of the exact model they stepped aboard, cut from these three days. A personal video keeps your boat in front of a buyer who has seen a hundred others, and carries your show investment into the selling season.

The boat is the star. Our work is making sure buyers see it the way its builder does.

Timothy Kline is the Primary Director of Hilo Motion Pictures, a Newport Beach video production company founded in 2003.