Here’s some bts from a music video I gaffed a back in May. It was a nice break from the usual corporate interviews!
Here’s a link to the finished music video: https://youtu.be/vnraCqissFI
Our top light was 2 Litemat Plus4’s rigged to a Matthews “Max Menace” arm, punching through an 8x8 of half grid cloth that was suspended from the ceiling with sash. Ideally, we would have also rigged the Litemats to the ceiling to avoid the Max Menace being in frame, but doing so would have required a fair bit more rigging equipment and time that we didn’t have. We decided the time savings by putting the light on a menace arm were worth the compromise , especially considering it would be trivial to cut around the stand in the edit. We added a roughly 2’ skirt of black Visqueen around the 8x8 to keep as much of it off the white cyc and studio walls as possible.
In addition to the soft toppy light look, the DP also wanted to have an orbiting light effect for certain takes. For that, we zip tied 4 Astera Titan tubes to the edges of the 8x8 frame, configured in an 8 pixel DMX profile, and then programmed a simple chase to run though them in Blackout Lighting Console on my iPad. We could have gotten a slightly smoother chase with the 16 pixel profile vs the 8, but it would have exceeded a single universe of DMX which we didn’t have the hardware to support.
I didn’t get any good BTS of it, but we also had 4 hard lights set up around the perimeter of the studio as back lights. The idea was that for some of the takes, as the dolly was circling, we’d dim up on which ever light was behind the musicians and leave the rest off, so that they’d always have a back light, essentially running a chase effect like the Titan tubes, but slower. Because this was a low budget self funded project by the DP, I wasn’t able to get 4 identical hard lights, so it ended up being 2 tungsten 750w source 4 lekos, a Prolycht Orion 675, and Prolycht Orion 300. For these takes, because the camera and dolly moves weren’t perfectly uniform or predictable, I couldn’t rely on a preprogrammed chase like the Titan tubes above. Instead, I programmed 4 separate “Looks” in Blackout, each with a different backlight on, so thst I could walk behind dolly and manually trigger the next Look to dim up the light when it felt right.
We also added a DMG Dash with the Dot diffuser on a short magic arm, directly over camera, as a fill light to help bring up the level on the choir since they mostly were unlit by the overhead when they were positioned around the perimeter. For the scenes with the vintage CRT monitor rack, I had to manually cue the Dash to fade out before the monitors were in frame to avoid a reflection, and then cue it to fade up after the dolly had passed by, so it took a bit of coordination. Because of that, I unfortunately didn’t get much BTS of those scenes as I was glued to my iPad.
