Wizards Beyond Waverly Place school plates

The first half of season 1 of Wizards Beyond Waverly Place has dropped on Disney and Disney+ and I shot all the school exterior establishing shots. Sometimes we'll have a producer with us, but this one was off on our own, so I ended up figuring out a lot of the shots and directing the actors. Not that building exteriors are overly complex. We shot day, dusk and night shots just in case the main unit had any school scenes that take place at other times, but so far all of them have just been daytime.

We shot this on the RED Gemini, which is great for when night started to fall and we had super limited lighting options to light up an entire school building facade. For the daytime, we used an Angénieux Optimo 24-290 zoom for ease of focal length changes, but switched to Zeiss Super Speeds and Sigma Art Cine Primes for night due to their much faster T-stop. Nighttime lighting was primarily done with Aputure/Amaran LED sources since we had limited power and crew. Daytime lighting was provided courtesy of the giant nuclear furnace in the sky through a nice soft diffusion of airborne H2O.

Part way thorough the shoot day, they asked me to find additional building shots that we hadn't approved ahead of time. I sent them the above shot from my phone as a potential angle/location, got approval, and then matched the shot with our RED. 

Here it is in the show. I think we lined it up really close to the reference I had sent them earlier.

It's always interesting to see how many different establishing shots I shoot and then how many and which ones they choose to use in the show. I try to make sure I get plenty of coverage for all sorts of scenarios, times, and shot variety so they always have the option to change things up a bit in future seasons as well.

iHeartRadio AMA - Alice the G00n

I recently shot a little AMA for iHeart Radio and Alice the G00n. We referenced the lighting for a particular scene in a movie (which, to play it safe, I won't name since it'll tie in to the next music video) which had a harder light, under-lit look. I started off with quite a bit softer light and the producer kept saying, "It's too soft!" so I obliged with a more direct lighting style because I like to make my clients happy. And it more closely matched the reference this way. 

Recently, I picked up a set of Dulens APO mini primes and I put them to use on this shoot. They have a little more vintage look, with some softness taking the edge off the digital sensor and leaning a little towards the warmer side. It was just a crew of the producer (who also ran audio), Alice and myself. Since the main camera, a RED Komodo, was a locked off wide, I brought my Sony ZV-E1 as well to operate as a medium tight B-cam so that they would have the ability to edit without having jump cuts. I often use my Sony as a B-Cam, mostly for slow-motion work, so this was my first time using it as a second angle. For being a "blogger" camera, it looks really nice. Side note, the ZV-E1 has the same full frame sensor as the very popular FX3.

In Time music video

This is another Alice the g00n music video, called In Time. Since Alice writes, directs, and edits her own music videos, it's a great collaboration as I only need to go to one source to answer most of my questions! Unlike the previous music video, which had a ton of green screen and post FX, this one was shot almost entirely on a stage with an LED wall, so the FX work was primarily done in camera. It was also an interesting one to shoot, as the entire video basically takes place inside a car, so that we had a lot of conversations about how to shoot it while spending a bunch of time in a tiny space.

Once again, I shot with the RED Komodo, as it packs a lot into a very tiny body, which is very helpful when space it tight. For glass, I went with the Sigma Cine primes as they fit the budget, are fast, and, again, are compact. I do find them a tad too sharp for the look I wanted, so I used Tokina Black Alchemy diffusion filters in the Bright Tangerine Atom matte box (again, nice and tiny).

We started the day shooting in the trunk of the car before moving on to some daylight shots, then the car moves into a 2001: A Space Odyssey style slit scan tunnel. I utilized the LED wall as much as possible as a light source, supplementing with a key light (Vortex through an 8x8 - size limited by the low ceilings in the stage) and an LED back light to create some hard "sunlight" coming in the window as well as filling in a bit of the interior.

For the tunnel, I relied mostly on Astera Titan tubes with colored pixel animations to create moving light as the car whizzes down the tunnel. I also lit the car interior with an additional solid Titan coming in through the sunroof, giving me a bit of ambience at all times.

My lighting diagram (for the daytime scenes) I drew from the location scout photos. This is pretty much exactly what we did on the day.

The lighting setup for the tunnel driving.

You can see the completed music video here:

Secret Gospel

Secret Gospel, a short horror/suspense film I shot last year, has debuted on Japanese streaming platform Samansa, which makes sense as the financiers behind it are Japanese. It was written and directed by Brandon Aumen, a friend I've known for many years and we've wanted to collaborate on a project, but never matched up until this one.

We shot this over the course of 4 days with two primary locations: the convent and the main character's home. Our camera rental budget was super tight and I needed fast lenses for the nighttime and dungeon scenes, so went with Sigma Cine primes. The Sigmas were a bit too sharp for my taste, so Tokina was nice enough to lend me a set of their Black Alchemy diffusion filters to try out (I bought some after using them on this shoot and liking them so much) and they helped to take the edge off the image. We shot with my RED Komodo 6K at a 1.9:1 aspect ratio, as we wanted a little wider than the 16:9 look but not quite an anamorphic 2.4:1, which would take a little too much off the top and bottom.

For lighting, we utilized mostly Aputure LEDs, such as the 300X, 600X, and B7C. For tubes, we went with the tried and true Astera Titan Tubes. I tried to utilize sunlight where possible, as I'm a fan of natural light. While this is a modern day film, I went for a little less saturated, slightly warmer color palette to give it a more timeless visual aspect. If it weren't for the laptop and car giving away the era, I feel like this could have taken place in the 70s.

So I'll just leave you with some non-spoiler screenshots from the film.

CYA music video

I recently shot a music video for Alice the g00n, called CYA. It was a studio shoot that was incredibly VFX heavy, which is always a concern on a moderate budget. In this case, I had to rely heavily upon very specific storyboards and framing to keep the amount of VFX work in check (framing shots to keep us off what would be a CG background as much as possible). Since she's both directing and editing the video, Alice had a very dialed in vision for exactly how the edit would work and what framing would be, so I have a lot less work picking shots than I'm used to. But at the end of the day, I'm there to deliver on the director's vision where keeping communication lines clear and working to the plan is very important so the VFX budget doesn't get blown up.

For the project, we shot on Atlas Orion anamorphic lenses on RED Komodo @ 6k. I didn't use any diffusion filtration to keep things as sharp as possible to help post with their background replacement. The director wanted a Lady Snowblood inspired look, which was fairly low contrast.

The Gordita Chronicles establishing shots

Wrote this up a while back and forgot to hit "publish." Oops, better late than never I guess.

A bit different from my normal shoots, this one was establishing shots from a jib. We hired a jib operator for this one, as that's a fairly specific skill set. No Ronin this time, which was a nice break from having to tech that piece of gear, leaving me more time to think about lighting the building (we had some nighttime shots) with very limited options for light placement.

Fortunately, the weather was pleasant and everything went off without a hitch. I got to put some of my new Amaran LED lights to use, which are very convenient for their low power draw relative to output, as well as having color temperature and output intensity options that can be controlled directly from an app.

B Positive driving plates

Quite a few of my driving plate shots are done at nighttime using a RED Gemini on a Ronin 2 mounted to a Flowcine Black Arm. The Gemini has great low light for these situations where we can't light and the Sigma Cine 14mm is pretty fast for such a wide lens, coming in at a T2. We also use Zeiss Super Speeds, but they have pretty strong purple fringing wide open at T1.3 so I usually stop them down to T2 for a much cleaner image. In this one we filmed a police car picture vehicle, which is different, as normally we're trying to hide the police cars/bikes that escort us when filming on public roads.

A month later, in a change from our usual driving plate shots, it was requested that we shoot on a hard-mounted setup rather than the Ronin 2 on Black Arm that we normally use. Easy enough. We built out an extra wide high-hat base for stability and bagged and ratcheted it down in the back of a van. The angle was set and the camera car driver would determine the framing by maintaining speed, accelerating, or slowing. It's decidedly low tech, but got the job done. We were just getting car to car (or I guess "van to van" is more accurate) and then did some van drive-bys with the camera on sticks.

Like usual, shot on the RED Gemini with the Sigma Cine 14mm and Zeiss Super Speeds.

Call Me Kat plates

Worked a couple jobs recently for Call Me Kat. One was some driving plates at night. Single camera (RED Gemini for it's great low light and high ISO abilities) using the Sigma 14mm on a Ronin 2. Pretty much the go-to setup for our driving shots. The other shoots was a bit different, as they wanted some ~180° plates (from a tripod). For this we used 3 RED Komodos, with the outer cameras positioned 45° off of the center camera. Again, we utilized the Sigma 14mm for its wide field of view. This gave us good overlap between the cameras while also seeing a lot of real estate.

To trigger all three cameras at the same time, I utilized the Tilta Nucleus, with each motor (1 per camera with a run/stop cable) set to the same channel so all three would trigger off of a single hand unit. Normally I would also mount the motor to be functional on the camera (controlling the iris so all three would match), but due to not having a prep and how the cameras had to be mounted, we had to remove the iris rods to make the cameras fit on the plate, so the motors couldn't be mounted to control iris or focus. I thought that might be the case beforehand, but wasn't worried since all the cameras were easily accessible and I could set the iris and focus by hand.

I do enjoy doing some of these less common rigs. Like I said, we didn't have a prep but I planned ahead of time to make it work with as few hitches as possible and except for not being able to mount iris rods, everything worked as expected, though there were some paper-thin clearances between cameras! I have a few ideas for next time to make things even more efficient and simple, so hopefully more of these camera array jobs come up!

Setting up for night driving plates.

Triple Komodo array with cameras set to 45° increments.