Justin Moore Live Concert

You can't complain when you spend the weekend working in the Ozarks at Gaston's White River Resort.  We were lighting a live concert for country music singer Justin Moore.  The day started with dumping the truck and laying cable.  We brought two generators because we had to power the whole production.  One 30kw was dedicated for lighting and the other for sound, camera, etc.

There were two big challenges to this particular job.  The first challenge was the time in which the concert took place - magic hour.  The hour long show started with the sun and ended with the moon.  I keyed with a 12k LTM fresnel through a 12x quarter light grid on the same side as the sunset.  This allowed me to elongate the length of the sunset another twenty or thirty minutes after the sun went behind the trees.  The ambient light was still glowing and filling in the shadows and the fill side.  I set my fill light with a 4k ltm fesnel through another 12x quarter light grid.  As the ambient light started to fade this light picked up the pace, eventually landing our stop at a consistent 4/5.6 and filling in the scene very evenly for the rest of the show.  Around the same time the tungsten units we placed around the scene up-lighting the trees started to show in the image adding a nice warmth to the coming night.  Lighting the trees grounded the scene nicely after the sun had completely set.

The second challenge was the amount of space we had to light (an audience, boat, pick up truck, 5 band members, Justin, and the surrounding trees).  We could not get our lights in very close so we had to go with some bigger guns backed up.  The cameras were shooting 630 ISO at 60 FPS and they needed an exposure of 4/5.6.  This is a decent amount of light loss right out of the gate. So there was a goldilocks zone of light we had to find.  How close could we get our units without limiting framing options for the wide camera.  The 12k was 30ft away from Justin.  The 12x frame was 7ft away from the light.  This combination gave us our stop.

After the concert started there wasn't much we could do but sit back and enjoy watching the show gently fall into our light from the TNDV truck.

The only surprise we experienced during the show was a sudden and unexpected hoard of insects that gathered to watch Justin.

Living in the south I'm used to dealing with bugs flying around HMI's at night but this was something I've never seen before.  We ended up having to put clear gel over our tungsten units lighting the trees because the bugs were flying into them and smoking up the scene.

This was our 4k LTM par lighting up the other side of the river and the thick layer of stagnant fog.  We really needed a 12 par here but the light still showed up in the shadows.  Every one at Gaston's was extremely friendly - except for these geese.  They were ready for us to leave!

Lake Bosumtwi in Kumasi Ghana

Earlier this year a producer/director turned really good friend of mine Kenny Jackson (in the photo above) called and asked me if I wanted to go with him to Ghana Africa for two weeks as a camera operator for his company Anthem Pictures.  I said yes before he had a chance to finish the sentence.  He had already hooked me into the story over a year ago when he told me about it while driving to Nashville for a commercial spot.

Here is a small part of the work in progress "Drawn From the Water"

A month later I found myself on a plane in Little Rock Arkansa headed to Accra Ghana.

We were there to tell several stories rolled up into one.  I can't possibly do any of them justice in this blog so I will leave it to the final product and the organizations that surround the families and children involved (http://www.touchalifekids.org/) (http://connorssong.com/) (http://www.anthempictures.tv/)

I didn't want to leave and can't wait to go back.  The people we documented built something that will have a lasting impact on Ghana and its children.

A Quick Look Back (01)

Some set photos from the past two weeks

VA Commercial

DP Ryan Parker on a Magna Bank Commercial

Gold Strike Casino Commercial

A Rocket To The Moon: Whole Lotta You [OFFICIAL VIDEO]

This was another quick two day shoot I did in Nashville several months ago.  Very natural, barely any lighting.  We mostly used bounce and negative fill and the occasional 1.2 hmi.  The DP brought his own covered wagons (incandescent bulbs caged in chicken wire and covered in muslin). They are one of the best DIY lights around.

Lighting Marathon

Mobility is a very important aspect of shooting in any large facility.  You have to know exactly what you need to get the job done.  You can't bring to much, but you also don't want to find yourself stuck needing something that is far off in the depths of a grip truck on the other side of a building.

Over the weekend I gaffed a two day hospital shoot.  We moved all over.  Room after room.  Set up after set up.  If you choose the wrong carts on a job like this your day can become pretty miserable pretty fast.  When moving around a crowded hospital you don't want carts that are taller than you or carts that take two people to maneuver.  That's why I like to roll with this three cart set-up, keeping bare bones and low profile in mind:

On the left we have a kino cart I made over a year ago out of unistrut.  I got tired of working off of kino carts that were always over sized for the job so I built one that fit the parameters of my own work (four 4ft 2 banks and two 2ft 2 banks with three shelves and a space for spare tubes).  The middle cart is a run of the mill rubbermaid carrying a 1.2 HMI, 400w joker, two 1k babys, two 650s, a spiderlite, ice light, sand bags, stingers and some 4x4s.  There is no reason to push around a huge 4x4 cart if all you need is a couple of floppies and diffusion frames.  Last but not least we have the taco cart.  Pretty self explanatory (small modifiers, rigging gear, apple boxes, c stands and light stands).

After preparing our carts we were off!  Trying to combine quantity with quality sometimes feels like forcing two magnets with the same polarity together.  It only works if you keep your set ups simple and consistent.  If daylight existed naturally in the environment than we went with a soft high key look:

If we found ourselves in an operating room or blood lab than we went with a top down approach:

 

The Ice light has continuously impressed me.  It reveals to me new ways in which to use it on almost every shoot I bring it on. I'm thinking about getting a second one.  Below we've got key grip Patrick Durkin keeping the set safe:

We busted out a lot of set ups in just two days.  Void was the stress you'd expect to see with such a compact schedule.  There were very few hiccups.

So I guess I will end this post with a joke.  How many surgeons does it take to fix a kino?

I don't know the answer, but I normally just smack the ballast a couple of times ;-)