Just wrapped up a two day PSA shoot with former Saints football player Joe Horn. You might remember him as the wide receiver that was fined 30,000 dollars for making a phone call to his family after scoring a touchdown against the Giants (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zrcAGkuk_o). On this shoot he played the famous son to a single mother.
Unfortunately we encountered nothing but a mixture of freezing rain, ice and snow throughout the shoot, but key grip Patrick Durkin kept the outside together and safe. Never forget your rain gear and always bring lots of socks!
The first bit of work involved a young woman in a hospital waiting room. The director wanted the scene to feel hopeless and dark, while still accentuating or actor. We hung a couple of 300's overhead to turn eye sockets into black caves for the extras, popped out the table in the foreground with a spotted 650 and rimmed the actress with a 1.2 HMI coming from outside. We color corrected the window with 1/2 CTO.
Then after a quick company move we found ourselves in the bedroom of the young woman - thirty years into the future.
For this scene we used two 1.2 HMI's outside acting as moon light. One was a direct source to pop out the forest in the background and the other a high bounce bringing some soft light back into the room. With such large windows this proved to be a task of "where can we hide the light," but after a couple of tweaks we found the goldilocks zone. Scenes like these make you wish for a condor and at least a 4k but we made it work.
On the inside, down low on a beaver board, I had a 650 covered in 1/2 grid cloth bouncing into a 2x2 bead board. This acted as a practical glowing from out of frame and edged her out nicely on the profiles. Sometimes we get lucky and this time set decoration provided us with the perfect mirror for the scene - It had some built in tungsten lights. To add a bit more punch to this source, off frame I placed a fat boy kino heavily diffed out in light grid. This gave a nice creamy look.
This was our martini scene for the day.
One of the first scenes of day 2 involved our actress being escorted by a shofer to her sons limo. Once again we got a bit lucky with the architectural lighting that was already in place. I decided to use this as our motivating factor for our fill light. The challenge was finding a place to put our light. The whole house was in frame and there were no condor cranes coming to our rescue. A quick solution was placing a 2k Junior in the second story window aiming down through a 4x4 opal frame. This covered the whole walk very evenly.
Now to keep the moonlight look going I used one 1.2 HMI bounced up high and backed up on the same axis as the camera. I find placing the moonlight source right behind camera keeps the architectural shadows from showing, which decreases the sourciness of the light. This also acted as the key source. As a final touch I barely popped out a house deep in the background with another HMI.
LIMO IN THE RAIN
For inside the limo the cinematographer wanted a nice wide shot, which left very little room for lights. The space was already cramped enough with everyone in there so besides from the existing rope lights I decided to approach this one from entirely outside the vehicle. The only problem of course was the heavily tinted windows that took away about 3 stops of light. The cinematographer made one concession for me that made this set up possible. Gotta love cinematographers that leave room for collaboration and compromise. He angled the frame away from the windows on the right side allowing me to bring in a key source that looked like it was emanating from inside the limo.
For this I used another 2k Junior with 1/2 CTO on the doors. I knew with this much ND on the windows I'd get a magenta shift but I really liked the way it looked on camera.
For a backlight I punched a 1.2 HMI through each of the left side windows. I flew them high and angled them down all the way. Two more lights and we were done. A 200w Joker came in on the right side as a moonlight wrap and I had a guy up on a later with a Leicho to act as a street light. After a couple of people got on car pushing duty we were off. The scene looked great!
Here are a couple of more shots from production. Oh and if you like BBQ sauce, look for Joe Horn's Bayou 87 in a grocery store near you:
Great Blog! Great work!
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