Los Angeles & San Francisco
commercial director of photography
Los Angeles & San Francisco
commercial director of photography
Less Recent Shoots: |
|||
There are so many different ways to go at table top. Over the years, I’ve played with a number of alternative techniques involving lenses and lights, and I’ve found several delightful approaches. As for most types of cinematography, there’s no single way to got at it, but for any particular shoot there may well be one best way — given the look a client wants, and the money the client can pay to get that look. Lenses: One of my favorite lenses to shoot table top (for 35mm film) is the 16mm close-focusing Zeiss. For this Holly Stewart/Hidden Valley Ranch/Young&Rubicam shoot, we looked at a couple of different possibilities. Holly and her agency client and I agreed the 16 would be great for this shoot. By underslinging the camera on a Fisher jib-arm coupled with a Fisher cross-arm, and filming at 30 frames/second, I could float the camera inches from the table for beautiful, deeply focussed, spiraling moves over a kitchen table filled with tools and foods to reach our hero package. Lights: The other main choice concerns lighting style. For this shoot, we went for hard light. We place a 10K about 6’ three-quarters back, just slightly above table height. When the kitchen items themselves didn’t break-up enough of the light, we added more gobos off-screen, using everything from glass bricks, which allows mottled light onto the subject, to hard fingers, dots, scrims, bottles, sticks, pieces of gel, scraps of diffusions, etc., to make sharper or softer shadows. Overhead we flew a 6x6 muslin, and bounced a scrimmed Jr. into it to provide just enough fill to those shadows. Finally, we added about six tiny lights — midgets with snoots, dados, babies with focal spots — to splash light into critical areas that were blocked by other items on the table. A totally different approach is to place either muslin or trace right at the edge of the table, and hit that with a 10-K or 20-K just slightly above table height. Sometimes I cut slashes (in the trace) to let hard hits of light through. Usually I flag off the light-wrap with a large cuter so that the only light hitting the subjects comes through a 1-2" slit. This can be a truly elegant, single-light solution when the camera does not need to travel too far from the key, or where it’s appropriate to come out of a darker area — or go into one. |
|||
To begin mass marketing a relatively new product, a condom for women to wear — no more need to argue the guy into wearing his — we took over a 4th floor loft south of Market in San Francisco. A beautiful young woman stares out the window, waiting for her boyfriend to arrive. She sees him, breaks away from the window. crosses past her waiting bed, and opens the door. As she crosses, she remembers how she met him, and a rush of images from their dating floods her head. The spot closes on a product shot of the box. We filmed the product and all our heroine’s waiting and crossing the room in 35mm (5279) in one split day (part night) with a full crew. The following day we set off guerilla style: director Tom Donald, producer Allison Chase, and I filmed our heroine and "boy friend" dancing all over San Francisco in black-and-white super 8 (Tri-X reversal.) In our final cut, the contrast of her warm, lush (35mm) walk sets off beautifully against grainy (super-8) flashbacks to sculpt a stunning commercial. |
|||
A take-off on the famous
Apple commercial, in which a beautiful and athletic woman is chased For our version, we took over a 600’ x 100' hangar at the former naval ship yard in San Francisco. With one day to pre-light and one day to shoot, Key Grip Steve Cardelini and his crew hoisted black visquin with a cherry picker to cut off daylight pouring in the windows 75’ off the ground that ring the hangar. Gaffer Darrell flowers rigged maxi brutes on the front catwalks to simulate light from the giant screen that would be added in post, and we flew 5-K back-lights over the 30’ walls Production Designer Josh Koral created. Deep back of a row of fake columns, we set 10k’s and flags to create shafts of light and dark through which our heroine would run to reach the main room. Finally we flew from a big-eye 10K from a Condor straight down the isle as a back-light, and hosed down the floor to create a reflective sheen. Director Randy Field found a terrific Bill Gates look-alike to be Big Brother, and a strong athletic actress to be our liberator. We shot the entire 60-second spot in one 14-hour day, with glorious results. |
|||
Another imaginative exposure to Java for Sun Micro. In this adventure, a computer programmer furtively slips into a church and confesses to a ‘priest’ that he has "pure thoughts." "Do what you think necessary," the weary ‘priest’ advises. As the programmer exits the confessional, convinced he is alone in his burden, he discovers a long line of fellow programmers waiting to make their own, similar confessions. We lit and filmed the confessional in the style of the Godfather – brooding dark wood walls, a splash of light on the faces. To light the church nave, gaffer Darrell Flowers created two sets of nine, 1x1 mirrors that he rigged above the rear organ loft. We placed two 4-K xenons hidden by the balcony and aimed up into these mirrors to send multiple shafts of warm light down into the lightly-smoked Church. Shooting at a T2.5, we held the stained glass windows, shafts of light, and scattered churchgoers throughout the dim nave in a compelling visual moment. |
|||
|
|||
top of page |
