Lighting for small shoots

All right that was an opening scene from a super low budget ad that I've shot recently and I'm going to talk about some of the shots and how we did it. And it's an ad for well here in Australia we call them thongs but you Americans call them flip-flops. So it was a really low budget ad but sometimes I think these cheaper ones are more fun to talk about on YouTube because it's interesting trying to make something look bigger than it actually is with a small amount of tools. So this was a travel away job I did in another state in a small town with a director friend of mine. So I just had a really small kit of gear that I took, a couple of lights, a few other bits and pieces, my Alexa 35 and a set of Lomo Illumina lenses. So when I got there we scouted a bunch of locations and found the different times of the day we wanted to be in each of those spots. So this first shot here of this car pulling in this was done really early in the morning and the only thing we really did with this shot was just get VFX to replace this branding at the top to put the company's logo in there. Then he walks into this bar and there's this scene where he he takes off his shoe and then throws at the TV which turns it on and then it's this old-style National Geographic program of how this product came to be which is what the ad is about. So the moment with him standing there we lit this with a 300D with a CTO gel on it going into this umbrella which are really good for traveling because you can just sort of fold them up and tuck them down the side of a tripod case. So I usually just try and bring a couple of those on travel jobs. And then this diffusion tube here was from a company called Lightsock and inside of it is a titan tube which is just sort of wrapping that light around into his face a bit more and then above him there's another titan tube giving that sort of cool colored edge. These blacks here are because there was a window there and I was just blocking some of that daylight that was coming in. Then down the back out the window we had a 1200D creating this light here and I wanted the daylight in the background to have a more sort of blue feel to it but because we only had a small amount of gear and the 1200 was our brightest light I didn't want to have to put a full blue gel over it and then lose a lot of the level from doing that. So instead I just changed the kelvin on the camera down to like 3200 which made the daylight go more blue and then I've just added orange to these lights at the front on our guy and then that just brings him back to a more neutral color but we get to keep all that blue in the background. And then also back here I think we had another 300D or something similar to that which is giving this side edge on him and then it's lighting up this guy sitting here too. So essentially it's a hard light source on the back side of him and then it gets gradually softer as the light wraps around his face. This one I think was on the 25mm wide open at f1.3. I love what the lens is doing with all the texture in the background I think it looks cool. This one here we didn't have a budget for an additional zoom lens so instead how we got this shot was just in stages. We did this shot here first on an 85mm then left the camera in the same spot and put an 18mm on then got this shot and then moved the camera back and then got this shot and then in post you sort of blend them all together add this blur effect and then you get this like clunky kind of zoom but I think it fits the tone of this video. So this shot here with it flying through the air we got a piece from the middle of a turntable lazy susan thing cut it down and then put it on the end of a wooden stick. We did a few different practices in the office to find the right angle that we wanted and then ultimately settle on this one and then we just mounted this stick to the camera with a magic arm and also I had this little led light on the camera here just to lift the exposure level on it up a bit and then VFX just removed this stick in post and it works pretty good. There's a few other shots here that are pretty simple and then we did another one of these crash zoom shots again here. We did this one here first on the 85mm then again put the wider lens on and then went all the way up on the top of this hill and got this version and then they just got stitched together. This moment here with her holding it we just had that mounted to the camera so I'm walking along holding that and she's just pretending to hold it. All right that's it just a short one today but thanks to everyone who checked out the questionnaire recently for the cinematography tutorial videos that I'm making where I'm diving deeper into things like lighting and blocking and pre-production and thanks to everyone who left feedback about what videos you want to see more of so if you haven't had a look yet and want to check it out and leave any feedback there's a link below. All right bye!