Firstly can I say how great the Director Sophie Bernberg was on set.  She was solely focussed on performance and put a lot of trust in myself to compose and light the shots.  It was really nice working with a Director on set that got so much out of the actors until she felt she had what she needed and didn’t overshoot any material for coverage.  Once she had got the take she moved on.

This shot was lit with the existing fluorescent above to match the wide shots.  I brought in a small ultrabounce off-screen right to give a little lift and give a nice eyelight.  We used an existing radiator grill diffused on the inside with some 216 and a dedo-light to give us that soft spot of light to bring some depth to the frame.  I desaturated the colours in camera to give a more monotone feel for the scene that I felt would compliment the narrative.

In the shot above we wanted a really high contrast look.  It was really nice that Sophie was happy not seeing the actor’s faces a lot of the time and she was really bold in this respect.  I asked her if she wanted more light on the faces but she was really confident in her script and the performances to let most of the scene go slightly underexposed and we were particularly happy with the outcome.  This screengrab is ungraded and I expect to take a little saturation out of the shot while keeping the blacks crushed.  The shot was lit with 2 dedo-lights.  One we placed through a set of blinds and the other Ryan Geddis (1st AC/gaffer) managed to rig overhead giving a slight kicker to Hero (left) to pick her apart from the background.  We placed a California Sunbounce reflector in the drinks bay hidden in shot to give a slight lift.  That was it.  We wanted it to have a streetlit look so we placed CTO over the dedolight.

For this shot we wanted a neon seedy feel to the night scene.  This was achieved with two 4ft4bk Kino-flo fixtures gelled with neon pink and neon blue gels (will find out which ones in a later post).  In wider shots we gelled two dedo-lights onto the back curtain giving them an uncomfortable green tinge which helped create the mood we wanted.

For this scene we wanted a really awkward feeling between the family so we decided to shoot most of the scene from either below or far above head height to help reflect the family’s disengagement with each other.  Upon arriving on set we swapped the lamps in the background and turned all the house lights on.  The chandelier above gave a really nice soft toplight and we only added two dedo-lights to enhance the scene.  We replaced the bulbs in the lamps to 60W bulbs and they had a nice natural falloff in the background to help add some depth to the scene.  One dedo light we rigged to spotlight our protagonist Leonard so he ended up being 1/2 stop over which helped to portray his dominance in the scene.  We also asked him to have his legs up so that he further dominated the frame.  We had a little natural daylight falling in through a crack in the door and Sophie and I really liked the way it broke up the scene and gave it a colder more sterile feeling so we enhanced this with a Dedo gelled with CTB.  This can be seen on the two females arms and shoulders.

We shot the short on the Arri Alexa with Arri Ultra Primes in ProRess 4:4:4 for budgetary reasons (as opposed to ArriRaw).  I’ll go into further detail in future posts when the film progresses and include some lighting diagrams.

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 gafferholding 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!!!!!!

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 much 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