The Bath-House PT1

Hi Guys,  just thought I would upload some ungraded screen grabs from a short I shot a couple of months ago.  In another post when the film is finished I’ll include more detailed setups and why we chose to shoot the film in the visual style that we did.

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.