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.

Raven's Home establishing shots

For season 5, the show shifts from Chicago to San Francisco, so Raven will be attending a new school, Bayside High. With the new school location, new establishing shots were needed, so we spent a day shooting new exteriors with students coming and going, that can be dropped in whenever they want to establish the school location.

This was a fairly simple shoot, with a few specific angles and then just a bunch of different timings of the background actors coming and going to school in both the afternoon and into late evening after the sun went down. We shot on the RED Gemini using an Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm.

We shot a few angles to use over the course of the show, both with and without students and at different times of day so they can be used as establishing shots over many episodes and scenarios.

They also had us go out to Santa Barbara to film the face of a building that would serve as The Chill Grill, a restaurant the characters often visit. Again, we shot a lot of version with varying times of day as well as with pedestrians and without. The restaurant sign was added in post.