Once again, time to share some ideas and some thoughts i've collected after a recent project here at Musicbed. (musicbed.com). We recently ventured into another Promotional piece for the new version of our Musicbed App. We had a lot of thoughts of different things we wanted to try and different ways we wanted to communicate them visually.
We wanted to diversify our view a little bit and make our character a kick ass female director. And we wanted this film to feel more sporadic. So that it felt more like a glimpse into someones "way of life" as apposed to maybe just "a day in the life".
As usual I started on Evernote, going through my huge collection of stills, and also finding some new ones. Here's what the evernote looked like for this film.
We kept it pretty simple on this one. We actually did some pretty extensive storyboarding, Laying out every shot on a table, arranging and rearranging into what felt right. This made our edit pretty damn fast. And it also allowed us to shoot this entire film in just two days.
Here's our reference stills we were using for our treatment.
These images serve for more of a vernal theme of elements, not so much framing and tone. We wanted to give the feeling of being all over the place. mixing life and work and creativity all into one pot.
One of our biggest references for this was a commercial spot shot by Gustav Johansson and Casper Belslev.
Again, just a reference. I get really nervous about copying someones work, and or repeating someones feeling. I know the utmost important thing is to be true to your brand. Be true to who you're working for. So use anything and everything for inspiration, and then filter that all through the layers of your brand.
So the biggest need for this film was good producing. Luckily our team has one of the best and his name is Ezra Cohen. This film needed to be done on a pretty tight budget and timeframe. So Ezra went to work on scheduling, finding talent, and organizing locations. not an easy or quick task. Needles to say, he killed it. We made 10 locations happen in just two days with a crew of three guys. Props to him. Oh! and he also is a pretty damn good DOP. So he shot it as well :)
We wanted to be pretty mobile, so our gear package was very small. We made good use of simple bounce techniques and natural lighting from our great locations. My favorite shot came from a completely natural source. I had never noticed that the pool at me and my wife apartment complex could have ever looked so cool.
Our gear consisted of our Red Dragon, sticking mainly with a 35mm 1.4 Zeiss. And than the occasionally Canon 70-200. We shot at 6k with a 8:1 compression. with 1/8 Promist and Tiffen ND's .4 .6 and 1.2. Our friend Ryan Booth has been DPing a project for us for a while and has lived by promist. And we've fallen in love with it.
For lighting we used 2 tweenies, 2 Mole 2k's, Kino Flo Diva, and bleached and unbleached muslin for bounce or diffusion, as well as a simple roll of 216 diffusion for whatever. The biggest winner for natural lighting is gonna be your Floppies and negative fill. You gotta live by the sun and negative fill. Thats the secret. Get that under your belt and you'll do some damage.
We kept all of our interior lighting pretty motivated. We kind of chalked it up to a pretty good formula.
- Set practicals.
- enhance what is already there.
- Create Black (contrast)
- A-B everything
- no excess. (don't overdue it)
The biggest thing i've learned about lighting in the last couple months is that the smallest adjustments make the biggest differences. Adding something that only adds maybe a small stroke on the canvas is what makes someone better than the rest. Also knowing how much is too much. Knowing when to cut back, or not add anything at all.
Here's some examples of our interior setups.
Here is the lighting diagram showing the setup.
We also had the challenge of doing a day interior with practically no larger sources. our largest lights were just 2k fresnels. so we picked the right location and added a sun streak instead of trying to fake our way out of it.
At the end of the shoot, we ended up pretty happen about what we captured. Our talent was great, or team was great. Everything came together on this one. Here's all the screenshots from the film.
Here's the finished piece.