u/4acodmt92

All shot on my XT-3 & Voigtlander 23mm f/1.2 with Lightroom Classic's interpretation of the Fuji Astia recipe.

All shot on my XT-3 & Voigtlander 23mm f/1.2 with Lightroom Classic's interpretation of the Fuji Astia recipe.

Here’s some bts from a music video I gaffed a few weeks ago. It was a nice break from the usual corporate interviews!

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.

Some BTS from another political spot I gaffed a few weeks ago.

The key light was a Litemat Plus4 through a 6x6 of half grid cloth which unfortunately had to be right at the only point of entry into the space as the background for the b cam wouldn’t have worked if the key was flipped to the other side.

We added a 4x4 beadboard underneath, propped up on some apple boxes for some fill. 4x4’ floppy on the fill side for negative fill.

We then added a Nanlite 60C with a projector to put a defocused hard slash of light on the body, but ended up 86ing it.

2 Dedo DLED7N’s for the midground. One pointed at the edge of the blue couch, and the other pointed at the bookshelf next to it, as this area of the frame looked unnaturally dark.

For the bookcase in the background we blasted a 1200D from outside, with a “branch-aloris” made from 3 recently liberated branches pony clamped to a triple baby header on a c stand, just outside the window, to break up the clean beam for some realism.

Disclaimer: I’m a freelance Gaffer, not a videographer. I know many of you are used to working solo with limited resources, but I genuinely believe the techniques shown here can be applied and adapted to productions of any scale, which is why I bother to post them here in the first place :)

This particular shoot was a single interview that will be part of a larger documentary, though my involvement was limited to just this one day. We had a small crew consisting of a producer, DP, B-cam operator, sound mixer, gaffer (me), and key grip. The location was a rented Peerspace in Washington DC. Load in was surprisingly pain free with a parking spot right out front for my van and only a single small set of stairs leading into the space. Given the close proximity to set, we opted to stage most of our cases outside and only brought in what we needed, when it was needed. We had a 6am call with a 9am hard out for talent and were ready to roll by 7:30am. The interview ran about an hour, followed by 30 minutes of B-roll with the lighting setup unchanged. We were fully loaded out by about 9:45am.

Our key was a Litemat Plus 4 through an 8x8’ of half grid cloth. We added a 6’ meat axe vertically to control spill hitting the wall, and a single Titan tube alongside the 8x8 to subtly wrap the key to make it a bit less side-y.

A Dedolight DLED7N aimed at the talent’s upper body and desk added a bit of texture to the clothing to keep the key from looking too obviously artificial and overly soft. On the fill side we built an 8x8 solid t-bone for negative fill.

The backlight was a second Titan tube with a honeycrate for control. Space was tight on frame left, so we rigged it from frame right on a grip arm boomed out to still play from frame left. The talent was mostly bald, so the tube was aimed primarily at his shoulders to separate his dark jacket from the back wall. We also added a second Dedolight aimed at the vase frame left to lift it off the wall.

Finally, we placed an Aputure 1200D outside blasting through the windows to throw a pattern on the wall. We initially placed it just a few feet away from the window, out on the deck, but moved it further back to get sharper shadows and reduce how much of the wall was lit. The deck was small, so we ended up having to place the stand at ground level in the backyard and had to go full stick (about 13’-14’)to get the angle we needed.