Impulse

Amidst edit­ing RAAM footage and hop­ping between con­ti­nents, I flew down to California to shoot a video for one of my brother’s clients. It was a great exer­cise in impro­vi­sa­tion with tricky light­ing and echo-chamber-like accoustics. Still, we were incred­i­bly pro­duc­tive, doing 8 com­pletely inde­pen­dent setups in 7.5 hours. I also had a lot of fun work­ing with my brother. Have a look at the Definition Fitness web site to see video.

Lighting was inter­est­ing. Two walls are entirely glass, thus the California sun was the pri­mary light. Compact floures­cents, which give off a really ugly orange light on video, lit the inte­rior. Finally, the ceil­ing was about 15′ high, unfin­ished (e.g air ducts vis­i­ble), and painted matte grey. The net result: light came from the side, not from above, and was very blue com­pared to every­thing else in the room. Afternoon light gave us an addi­tional sur­prise: the broad, white side­walks reflected sun­light through the win­dows, giv­ing the actors a pale light from below. Great for hor­ror flicks; not so good for com­mer­cials.
Safety con­cerned me as I had only a crew of 2 (incl. myself) to tend the lights and about 10 – 12 peo­ple with no film-set expe­ri­ence run­ning around. Arri and HMI lights, the work­horse lights for video and films, are heavy and very hot (you can eas­ily cook on them). I did not want these lights around to burn or fall on some­one.
Finally, we wanted to shoot the place from sev­eral dif­fer­ent angles to make the shop feel larger. That meant we’d often be shoot­ing against a bright win­dow in the back­ground. To make it more inter­est­ing, some of the folks in these scenes could only come in the after­noon — when it was really bright out­side.
I lit the whole thing with the sun and a cou­ple of Mole Biax flu­o­res­cents light banks with day­light bal­anced bulbs from Indie Rentals. These lights are light­weight and rel­a­tively cool, thus safe. They put out a decent amount of light which helped fill when we were shoot­ing near a win­dow, and pro­vided good key and back lights for the leg-press shots. I’d still have liked quadru­ple the power when it came to that golf scene (shot near the end of the day), though.
Sound was tough — the steel roof, bare-concrete, and glass walls made for an excel­lent echo cham­ber. Even the lavolier micro­phones we put on peo­ple picked up a ton of echo. I wish I knew more about audio. I’m sure there’s some cool audio-filter I could’ve done in post pro­duc­tion.
Still, I’m happy with the final video. It’s the best I could do with my level of expe­ri­ence, and I had a lot fun doing it.

Related posts:

1. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 1
2. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 2
3. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 3
4. Published again!
5. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 4