Last year I was asked to shoot a commercial for ICELOLLY.COM with my good friends at ‘London Creative‘.

They wanted a beautiful location full of sun, warmth, bikinis and swimming pools.  Fortunately Spain seemed like a good option for them

After being scheduled to shoot the following week we didn’t have a lot of prep time at all.  I trawled the internet for rental houses in the Marbella area without any luck and the producers weren’t confident with dealing with foreign rental houses so we decided to hire the gear in the UK and bring it along with us (I was worried by this)

In regards to gear, we decided to shoot on the RED MX with Zeiss Super Speeds….I had originally plumped to shoot on the Arri Alexa for it’s latitude capabilities however at short notice we couldn’t find a price that fitted the budget (surprise surprise).  I chose the Super Speeds because I wanted to really open up the iris as I had a few ideas involving flares that I’ll go on to talk about later.

So we got to the airport and we had major problems getting the gear over on the plane.  The individual baggage limit was 32kg….our RED MX package alone weighed more than that.  This meant that we had to take some of the parts out to fit into other smaller boxes.  Furthermore, to save on the extra baggage allowance we had to tape together smaller boxes so that they came in at just under 32kg.  At the time this was pretty stressful, but in hindsight it was pretty funny as we came out unscathed (apart from the extra surcharges)

As a rule of thumb when I receive any gear from rental houses I get my assistant (who this time was the legendary Ryan ‘Angry Whopper’ Geddis) to label each box with a separate number.  That way at the end of the day we can line the boxes up, open them, and tick off all completed boxes so that the production don’t get any unwanted bills I took the lenses on myself as hand luggage.

We decided that the commercial would be shot in completely natural daylight.  This was a logistical choice as we didn’t have the budget to bring in 18k’s so manipulation of natural light was key.

I rented out a 6×4 ultrabounce along with a 6×4 soft gold reflector (california sunbounce).  The 6mx4m reflectors were large enough as I knew we were going to be in mid-shots and close-ups for most of the shoot.  These reflectors became my workhorses for most of the shoot (can be seen pictured top right).

The final thing that we had to consider was the direction of the sunlight.  On our first and only prep day the Director Mark Jackson and I (along with 1st AC Ryan) went to location and using the ‘Helios’ iPhone app we worked out where the sun would be at different times of the day and worked our schedule around what would give us the best light.  I wanted each character to be backlit as much as possible.

The Shoot

The shoot went pretty smoothly considering the circumstances and limited resources.  We were only able to use sections of the pool area so our shot selection was slightly restricted but we knew this would be the case.

I wanted to shoot as wide open as possible and with the Zeiss Super Speeds opening up to 1.4 this allowed me to experiment with some flares to give some interest in the frame.  We shoved in an ND1.2 along with a Polariser most of the time to bring us down to f2-2.8 most of the time.

For the opening shot of ‘the larger belly’ I had my gaffer (Seb ‘owns only one t-shirt’ Lamb) put a small mirror on a C-Stand just out of shot subtly reflecting the sunlight directly into camera.  He tapped it randomly to give greater flares that you’ll see at the start of the commercial.  This worked pretty nicely I think and was a cheap way of getting flares without bringing in our own sources of light.  You can see this setup in the lighting diagram (picture left) and in practise (pictured bottom right).

I used the soft gold reflector for most of the shots and this gave us a nice warm summer glow that was a nice fill to our sunlight key.

Apart from these particular shots most of the time was spent finding a nice composition and waiting for the light to be just perfect.  As usual we tried a few experiments including reflecting lights through waterfalls but sadly none of them gave us a look that appealed as much as the natural frame.  We’ll always keep trying though

The experience was a big learning curve on how to shoot abroad (and how not to).

If you have the time find a LOCAL rental house!!!!!

CHECK THE FINAL VIDEO OUT BELOW

A couple of weeks before Christmas I got a call from Matt Snyman asking if I would like to shoot a commercial for him to enter into the Mofilm competition for Chevrolet.  We quickly bounced some ideas off of each other and he said the magic words to me that every DoP wants to hear – “I’m leaving the visual style completely in your control, make it look cool”.  I was immediately on board.

The idea for the commercial was simple. It opens with two children, sitting in a make-shift cardboard car that they have constructed.  They then travel on an imaginary journey across the world in their cardboard car before returning into the garage as adults in a real Chevrolet car.

We were shooting in a double garage on a very small budget but we had managed to wrangle a RED MX and a full set of Zeiss Super Speeds from Decode UK.  The challenge was to create a visually striking commercial with a high budget look in a confined space with limited power (we were running off mains electricity).  I gave a call to James Kar, a trusted fellow DoP to give me a hand as gaffer and he also came on board which was brilliant as it enabled me to focus on the project as a whole.

First I set about lighting the cardboard car scenes and I wanted maximum flexibility.  Working with children takes a lot more patience and I knew that the kids would get bored really quickly so I needed a lighting package that could be quickly changed with the best efficiency so I opted to bring in a couple of Dedo-light kits that are very flexible with their size, quality of light and the ability to dim.  I wanted an overall ambient light inside the cardboard car coming from above and we did this by balancing (I stress the word balancing as all we had was a little bit of gaffer holding it in place on the garage door joist) a kino-flo with a set of four tungsten tubes.  This gave us a really nice slightly spotlit soft light from above which was enhanced when we smoked the garage up.  For the children’s light we simply used two dedo’s close up cross-lighting both of them.  This worked really nice as we were able to bring the lights in really close to give us a soft directional light which also provided nice eyelights you can in the commercial.  And finally to light the green screen I simply used two diffused redheads to give a nice even light on the green screen.  I was happy for the three characters (yes, they were a Panda, a Penguin Pilot and a Rabbit cowboy) in the back seats to be slightly underexposed as I didn’t want the viewers eyes to distract them away from the main characters.  That was pretty much the basic setup for the shoot.

As you can see from the lighting diagram we also had several Dedo lights gelled with different colours and an LED light that we would spin continually to give the illusion of the car passing through the bright lights of the vibrant cities around the world that the children travel through.  It was a really low budget way of achieving a nice feeling of movement in the car and we were pretty happy with the effect in the rushes.

We were running out of time towards the end of the day and we needed to get the final shot of the car pulling into the driveway at night-time.  I knew that I would have to have some lighting outside so that the car wasn’t entering the garage from a black wilderness so we put up a 1.2k HMI and raked it as a 3/4 backlight across the front driveway and it was able to pick up hints of foliage and also rimlit the car which worked nicely.  Inside the garage we had to remove all lighting equipment to be able to let the car fit in with enough space.  Ideally, when lighting cars it is really nice to be able to place some bare kino-flo bulbs around the car which reflect in the curvature of the car however unfortunately we didn’t have enough time nor the resources to make this happen.  in the end we had to settle with using the existing fluorescent fixtures in the garage to light the car as it entered and fix the mixed colour temperature to our taste in post..  Sometimes you have to find a compromise in your lighting even if it is not to your taste and this is a definite example of that situation.

For the shoot we also rented a smoke machine from a prop house which gave us some crazy amounts of smoke.  I really wanted the garage door opening sequence to be overly dramatic and luckily Matt was so on board and open-minded with my ideas that he plumped for the smoke machine as well and I’m glad he did.  it took a lot of choreography to get the smoke outside the garage door just right so that when it opened the smoke billowed into the garage.  I placed our 1.2k HMI behind the smoke and pointed it through the cars windscreen to flare the camera and deliberately over expose the smoke to help sell the children’s imagination.

With all my projects I really like to get involved as early as i can in pre-production and will always try and go to the grade to complete the visual look for the film as so much can be changed in the grade and your work can be ruined to as much of an extent as it can be improved and this is why I feel it is so important to attend the grade.  Sadly on the project I wasn’t able to attend as I was at Camerimage (a cinematography film festival) in Poland so I hope to get the footage to have a play around with myself at some point.

Overall though, considering our restrictions and the turnaround time it wasn’t a bad effort.  There were a lot of compromises we had to deal with which in hindsight I would have loved to have changed but such is the nature of the beast I would have been there all night making minor adjustments.

The commercial was nominated for the best commercial along with 20 others and has a great chance of coming in 1st place in it’s group.

WATCH THIS SPACE!!!!!!

]]> http://edmundcurtis.com/chevvy-bts-2/feed/ 0 http://edmundcurtis.com/2012-is-here/ http://edmundcurtis.com/2012-is-here/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:39:52 +0000 edmundcurtis http://edmundcurtis.com/?p=625

So it’s 2012 and part of my New Years resolutions is to be more active on blogging and Twitter so here we are .

2011 was a BIG year for me including shoots for Temper Trap, Chuckle Brothers, Jessie J and many more.

I am now also represented by The Crewing Company which is hopefully a big step in the right direction in getting new exciting work and they are a lovely company to be represented by.

James Kar and I collaborated on our first music video together – ‘Strange Fruit’.  The video was a resounding success and saw a lot of positive feedback from the online community and the Behind-The-Scenes video got an incredibly warm response and was nominated for ‘Best BTS Video’ at the fstoppers BTS Video Competition…check it out on the right.

Luckily, my filming this year has taken me across the world.  I completed a five day shoot in the USA which consisted of taking a road trip from Manhattan up to some beautiful landscapes in up-state New York.  Quite an incredible adventure.  A commercial with The London Creative had me whisked away to Marbella for 5 days shooting in a beautiful 4* hotel overlooking an incredible mountain scape.  That shoot also happened to give birth to what is now known as ‘The Devilish Flaming Cointreau’ (a flaming drink drunk by many at the wrap party)

The year topped itself off nicely with quick-fire commercials with the Chuckle Brothers and then further shoots with Jessie J and Jason Derulo followed by a charity project with my good friend Mark Jackson for Macmillan Cancer Support.

Around the Christmas period I was very privileged to be a volunteer for Crisis at Christmas (a nationwide charity caring for the homeless). Although this has nothing to do with filming I thought I would add this in as it truly made me appreciate the privileged life that I lead as a film-maker and as a person.  Giving my time was a truly rewarding and humbling experience, so such so that I attended several extra days of volunteering and am certain that I will do the same next year.  The experience was further rewarding as one of the guests (the term used for the homeless people) bought in an incredible Super8mm film camera (that he had found along with another camera and long lens in a bin) and was particularly intrigued as to what it was and how it worked.  It was a truly great experience sharing what I knew about the camera and talking with him about what each dial meant and teaching him the fundamentals of film-making.  We had a conversation for an hour over a cup of tea about what he could do with the camera and although he probably saw it as a simple lesson in film-making, it turned out to be one of my most rewarding and moving times of the week.  I would fully advise volunteering to anybody around the christmas period for 2012 and beyond.

So what’s new for 2012?????? Well let’s hope very good things

Curtis and Kars’ (our tentatively named film production company) new BTS video for some recent Grolsch commercials has seen some awesome reviews and the video has already chalked up more than 7’000 hits and counting.  With an average rating of 4.9/5 from over 100 ratings we have big hopes for it getting shortlisted at the fstoppers awards for ‘Best BTS Video’ too!!!!  If you haven’t already seen it please check it out as we love to share any work that we do with the film-making community.

Our competition entry can be found here but if you want to check it out directly you’ll find it below.

And below you can see the final results….

So looks like I’m starting 2012 off with a bang and to keep the ball rolling over the next few weeks I intend to post a lot more about projects I’ve been working on.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

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