When Nashville-based filmmaker Devon Williams (IG: @fatherofbirds, YouTube: @fatherofbirds) walked into a partially finished restaurant to film interviews for an ongoing documentary series, he was met with a familiar logistical problem: multiple cameras placed in tight quarters, collaborators who needed to see the shots, and a physical space that offered almost no room for traditional monitoring setups. The new restaurant site for Noko, located in Nashville, had only one working outlet, limited access points, and walls that blocked direct lines of sight to two of his angles.
Williams needed a way to run three LUMIX cameras on battery power, position them wherever he needed, and still keep the PR team and restaurant owners informed about what his cameras were capturing. Instead of building a small video village or renting wireless transmitters, he turned to LUMIX Flow, an app for real-time multi-device camera monitoring.
(Maddy Meston, VP of Marketing for Noko Hospitality, reviews production notes during the shoot.)
For Williams, the shift to LUMIX Flow was less about adopting a new tool and more about reducing friction on set. “It’s being able to give the people who aren’t working the camera a level of comfort,” he said. “Everyone turns the app on, and now everyone has their angles. They can’t mess with anything. They can just focus on what it looks like.” Flow allowed each collaborator to walk freely around the space with their own phone or tablet, viewing the feed without crowding around a single monitor. It also meant Williams could keep his cameras positioned in the best spots for the interviews rather than the most convenient spots for monitoring.
Williams’ filmmaking background spans weddings, portraits, music videos, touring with bands, corporate assignments, and food content. He switched to LUMIX when the G85 came out, since it offered 4K video when most affordable cameras didn’t. “I researched cameras like crazy,” he explained. “I kept coming to the G85. It kind of had everything.”
His LUMIX kit has grown steadily since. Today he relies heavily on the S5IIX, S1II, S9, and an additional S5II, often running three cameras even when the production doesn’t strictly require it. “I just always like having a third angle,” he said. “Even if I don’t use it, there’s always some wide establishing shot.”
(LUMIX Creator Devon Williams checks the frame on one of his camera setups.)
The Noko series has become one of Williams’ most personal documentary efforts, built around the people behind the restaurant industry rather than the dishes. The company, which includes an Asian-inspired, wood-fired restaurant and a sister omakase concept, emphasizes industry reform, including better working conditions, healthcare, and mental health support for hospitality workers. “The purpose was that everyone in the restaurant industry should have healthcare, dental, and vision,” Williams said. “Every employee gets a free gym membership, free access to therapy and we donate 1% of all our profits to the Nashville Children's Alliance.”
He first connected with the restaurant team during a business trip, eventually pitching a documentary approach that would follow the company as it grows and opens new locations. “This project is going to be ongoing,” he said. “It’s a series of constant interviews saying our mission every time we open a new restaurant.” Instagram and TikTok will carry much of the short-form content, while YouTube and the company website will hold longer pieces.
For a recent interview shoot where LUMIX Flow was most useful, Williams set up three cameras: the S5IIX as the tight A-cam, the S1II capturing a profile angle, and a second S5II framing a wide establishing shot. Every angle was recorded in 6K Open Gate in V-Log, which he uses to maintain more flexibility in post.
(Using LUMIX Flow, Williams monitored his main camera on his iPhone with a long USB-C cable.)
The first question Williams asks is where the content is going to eventually live and shooting in Open Gate allows him to choose. Because the restaurant’s interior is small, certain compositions look better in horizontal wides than vertical crops, but the team still needs vertical edits for social platforms. Frame markers helped guide those decisions without locking him into a particular aspect ratio on set.
The physical layout of the space introduced a major challenge: one of the cameras had to be positioned behind a gate in a spot he could not reach without stepping into the shot. With no easy way to stand behind it, and no interest in running long HDMI cables through an active setup, Williams used LUMIX Flow to operate and monitor the camera remotely.
LUMIX users will typically mount an iPhone on top of the camera to serve as the Flow “master,” but Williams changed that approach because he wanted the larger iPads to be available for the PR team and restaurant owners. A longer USB-C cable connected his phone mounted to a desk and then to the S1II, and the rest of the team connected wirelessly through the Flow app.
This setup created a distributed monitoring system that would normally require several wireless transmitter/receiver pairs. In the past, Williams would either bring a wired HDMI monitor or borrow a wireless unit when the job justified it. “It was always HDMI cables,” he said. “If I’m only going to use something a few times a year, it’s hard to justify spending hundreds of dollars,” he explained.
(The team monitored wirelessly on iPad via Flow, replacing the need for multiple wireless units.)
Multi-device wireless monitoring is simply not realistic for small productions. “You could never have that many wireless monitors for that many people,” he revealed. “That’s movie-level production.” LUMIX Flow changed that equation, giving him something close to a video village experience without the cost, gear load, space, or setup time.
Latency in wireless monitoring can sometimes lag, but for Williams’ production it wasn’t an issue. “It performs as fast as I would ever need it to,” he said. The reliability also allowed him to focus on interviews rather than technical troubleshooting. He passed an iPad between restaurant owners so they could see the interview angles without feeling the pressure of standing near the cameras. The PR team monitored framing as questions shifted, helping ensure that each owner’s most important soundbites were captured cleanly.
Williams did not use Flow’s storyboarding tools, take markers, or XML export for this shoot, but he expects those features to become more relevant as he continues working with the same PR staff on future productions. “Now that I have a PR person I’ll be working with consistently, I can see myself using storyboarding,” he said. “We talked about it on set. We just didn’t have time to hone in on it this round.”
(Williams credits LUMIX cameras for their ergonomics and the quick, intuitive way they handle.)
Asked more broadly how LUMIX has shaped his work, Williams pointed to ergonomics, accessible features, and speed. “Ergonomically, LUMIX cameras are the best,” he revealed. “They feel like an extension of me.”
He also noted that features such as shutter angle and false color appeared on LUMIX bodies before many competitors. “You get so much stuff other companies weren’t going to give you until you jumped to their super expensive setups,” he said. "The longer I do this, minimizing resistance is what I come back to,” he said. “LUMIX Flow is another example. That resistance for me is now gone. LUMIX exhausts me the least.”
To learn more, or to download LUMIX Flow, visit https://shop.panasonic.com/pages/lumix-flow-app.
