Shifting Gears driving plates

A recent episode (season 2, episode 7) of Shifting Gears featured driving plates I worked on. We shot all the neighborhood backgrounds and exteriors of the car driving around, and then the neighborhood backgrounds were composited into the shots of the actors inside the car that had been previously filmed on a green screen set. It's always fun filming classic cars.

Process plates were shot using a Toyota FJ Cruiser with a custom build for mounting the Black Arm, Ronin 2 and RED Gemini. For lenses, we used Sigma Cine primes to keep the image clean.

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.

Rutherford Falls season 2 inserts

I suppose they must have liked what I did in season 1, as I got brought back to do some insert shots for episode 3 of season 2, as the first unit must have ran out of time or they decided to add some shots when they got into the edit. This was a pretty simple one, with some handheld shots of preparing food in a kitchen. They were all closeups, so the set was literally 8 feet wide and only a couple feet deep, so basically just the stove, counter top, and some walls behind those.

We shot on the RED Gemini with Zeiss Super Speeds and I built it on my handheld shoulder rig. Lighting was matched to the first unit shots (recreating a big window with daylight behind and overhead tungsten lights). After completing that, we finished up the day by shooting some afternoon and evening car drive-by shots on sticks.

If you watch the opening scene of episode 3, almost every single "cooking" shot was our second unit shoot. We shot with doubles since you don't see their faces.

And then a few simple car drive-by shots for episodes 6 and 7, such as this one.

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.

Hacks - Latitude Talent Agency establishing shots

Edit: While watching Hacks season 2 I finally saw the establishing shots we did. I had originally thought they were for Hacks, as we shot them soon after the Las Vegas driving plates for season 1. I don't recall them getting used in that season, so I thought maybe the plates were for one of the other shows we shoot for. But then there they were, being used as establishing shots for the talent agency where Jimmy works. You can see the symmetrical buildings I took the BTS photo of in the background.

Sometimes I'm tasked with shooting a couple establishing shots for a TV show. The strange thing about the work I do is sometimes I have no idea what show I'm shooting for and I have no clue if this show ever came out, and if it did, what shots they used (it's been long enough that the show would have aired already). This shoot consisted of just some simple building establishing shots. We opted for the Sigma Art Cine 14mm and a couple of Zeiss Super Speeds (25mm and 35mm) to capture the large scale of the buildings.

The client had pulled some stills that they really liked so we were mostly matching the reference angles, though one was particularly challenging. Construction had started since the reference photos were taken and one of the shots would have put us smack in the middle of a huge work zone. So, with a little creativity, and tucking the camera right up against the barrier wall, we managed to get a shot that was very similar.

Since we were hiking around with our hands full of camera gear, I didn't get my usual BTS photos, other than taking a bonus shot of one of the buildings, but I like the symmetry.

Rutherford Falls - Camera Arm Car operating

Now that the series has aired, I can share another single pickup day I worked on, this time for the Peacock series Rutherford Falls. These are some simple driving shots of a BMW driving down a desert road, with some passes, jib ups, and other various shots. We were in a Mercedes arm car with a "The Edge 3" arm and head, shooting on a RED Gemini, as part of it would be occurring near dusk and into the night, so light levels would be low by the end.

I was camera operating the head via joystick and, while I've operated remote heads before, this was my first time operating in an arm car. It's really not that different from operating on any other shoot with moving elements or other car to car shots, which I do fairly frequently, so I wasn't worried at all. I was very happy with what we shot and the director seemed pleased.

All our shots are in the final episode (episode 10) of season 1. We did a night shot that is used in the middle of the episode (around the 12m15s mark) with the camera floating from the highway shoulder onto the road as the main character's car drives by. My focus puller did a great job as it was totally dark and there weren't really any visible marks he could pull to, so he was flying by the seat of his pants and nailed it.

We also shot what is essentially the closing shot of the season (they cut to the credits after our shot, then briefly cut back for an inter-credits "we have one more thing" moment). It's kind of cool that we were entrusted to capture the "closing shot" that is a nice visual send away to the characters for the season as the car zips by on a lonely highway while the camera jibs up with the car receding away towards the mountains.

Miracle Workers season 3: Oregon Trail VFX plates

Earlier this year I did some second unit photography for season 3 of Miracle Workers: Oregon Trail. These were VFX plates of river crossing locations, where the VFX team would take the high resolution pan and tile plates and populate these environments with CG characters.

The tool of choice was the usual RED Gemini. I shot each set of tiled plates with a couple different lenses: the Zeiss Super Speed 25mm and the Sigma Art Cine 14mm. In situations with little direct supervision, it's always safer to shoot two options in case one of them doesn't work for the VFX team. Adding that second option, even if it wasn't asked for, on a shoot like this is just a smart move since we had plenty of media and drive space and the plates weren't that data intensive anyway. They don't want to add another day of shooting pickups and I would prefer not to make the 6-hour drive to this location again. In the end, it is a bit time consuming since I'm shooting tiles (about 8-14 tiles for each shot), but I knew my schedule and knew I had the time to give them that secondary coverage and still make my day.

There was also a drone team shooting with us, but the wind was pretty strong and so our unit had to split up, with myself going off and shooting the plates all on my own while the field producer stayed with the drone crew, supervising their work. Fortunately, I had gone over the locations with the field producer beforehand, so I knew what to get and where.

One of the locations had a barrel full of firewood burning just off screen with tons of smoke pouring out, and there were no other places where the land jutted out into the water far enough to get the shot, so it had to the that place. Knowing I couldn't stop the smoke, I quickly moved on, hoping the fire would die down before I returned later in the day. When I came back to shoot the location near the end of the day, it turned out delaying was a positive, as the barrel was no longer smoking, but on top of that the tide had gone down and I was able to get out even further to place my camera, which ended up with a better shot.

After wrapping things up, I headed back and met up with the field producer and drone team as they were finishing up their day, and just in time too. The sun would soon be too low to get the shots we needed. Mission accomplished.

Getting the tripod a little wet is a small price to pay for a better shot.

Hacks HBO Max additional driving plates

I found the other episode we shot driving plates for in episode 7. This was a nighttime shoot, so we used a different LUT and mounted the cameras at a normal height rather than the elevated height for the double decker bus shots. We also had one camera mounted on the front, facing forward and up to capture reflection plates for the windshield. These shots were a little more simple, as they were background plates for a car driving scene.

The road was pretty rough, as construction had just started and they were tearing up the road (as you can see from the traffic cones in my shot of the monitor), but production needed to comp in the background of them driving up to the wedding chapel. Thank goodness for post-stabilization!

Last driving plates for Mom

Well, all good things eventually end and our time shooting driving plates for the Warner Brothers show Mom has wrapped. After running 8 seasons, we shot the plates for the final episode which aired just this last month. This was a pretty good show to shoot driving plates for, as they have quite a few driving scenes in them, much more than Young Sheldon, Bob Hearts Abishola, or any of the other WB shows we occasionally work for. Hopefully a new Chuck Lorre show will take its place and that show has lots of driving scenes.

As usual, we shot these on a RED Gemini with a 14mm Sigma Art Cine lens. This wide field of view gives the post production team some room to reframe as needed. The camera is mounted on a DJI Ronin 2 on a Flowcine Black Arm system to keep everything smooth, with us matching the camera height and angle of the original photography.

When we're shooting, we are provided with footage of the scenes that were shot on green screen, so we know the angle the camera was at, how long the scene runs (so we know how long of a continuous run to make), and if there are any vehicle maneuvers we need to make (such as pulling over, swerving, sitting at a stoplight/stop sign, etc) and when those maneuvers take place. Of course, we have police escorts involved to make sure everything is done safely and in a controlled manner.

Generally, we try not to fly the camera with an eyebrow, as even at low speeds and using our mesh eyebrow, the motors in the gimbal work hard, especially if the camera is facing forward. But all these shots were shooting backward and to the sides, and speeds were fairly low, so we were able to get away with the eyebrow on the camera. When we can't have an eyebrow, and due to the wide field of view on a 14mm, we have to plan the time of day carefully to both match the lighting of the already shot show footage while also avoid shooting into the sun as we can't have flares.

While these sorts of shoots are more technical in nature than creative, I enjoy putting that side of my brain to use, solving technical issues and not worrying about how I'm going to light a scene, for instance. Fortunately, I have a mix of projects that allows me to do both technical as well as creative work.

So, what do the final results look like? Well, here are some screengrabs from the episode this shoot was for, with all the backgrounds being the footage we shot that day.

Hacks HBO Max series plates

Earlier this year I went up to Las Vegas to shoot some driving plates for a show called Hacks. I had no idea what it was, but knew we had to rig the camera array 13' up in the air to match the second story of a double decker bus. We used a triple RED Gemini array, controlled through a router so we could roll and cut all 3 cameras at exactly the same time.

We did runs on both the Panavision lenses they shot the series on -to exactly match the optical characteristics- as well as 14mm Sigma Art Cine primes to give them larger field of view options. Better to give them both options and not need one than shoot one option and need the other that wasn't shot.

I was pretty surprised when a couple months later I saw ads for a new HBO Max show called Hacks. And dang it, it looked pretty funny. So these plates worked in episode 3 and, while I know they shot some of it practical, obviously plates were needed for other parts. Watching the show, since I knew plates were being used in the scene, I kept a close eye on stray hair strands, as that's usually the biggest way to notice VFX backgrounds. Whatever they did, they did nice work. There were a few instances where I think I can tell it's VFX backgrounds, but overall they did a really good job compositing everything together.

We shot plates for another scene as well, but I haven't seen them appear in the show yet. I'll keep an eye out for them and share once they're up. In the meantime, if you haven't see the series, I recommend it.