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.

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.

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.

Westworld season 4

I can't believe it was just over a year ago that we were out shooting plates for Westworld. For the new season, they knew they would have scenes on a train and that the train car would be a standing set. Rather than shoot green screen and composite in later, they had us shoot the train plates ahead of time so they could do LED walls for interactive lighting.

Seeing as how they would be train height and potentially see out of multiple windows on any given side of the train car, we shot with 3 RED Komodos on Ronins (for smoothness) with 14mm Sigma Art primes, which would cover a 180° field of view with enough overlap to stitch the cameras together. These were all built on a truck at train window height with the run/stop synchronized via a Tilta Nucleus. By setting the Nucleus motor on each camera to the same channel, a single handset could control the iris (which we wanted to match between cameras) and run/stop on all three units.

We shot a few locations for the show, some in the desert, some on the freeway between Glendale and Eagle Rock, and a bit near downtown.

We did discover that the Komodos don't like having their exhaust vent facing upwind, as the incoming air would fight against the fan blowing the opposite direction and create a sort of air-pressure stalemate, causing them to overheat quickly. We solved the issue by taking a small piece of foam board, folding it into a "V", and taping the "tent" over the the exhaust port, effectively keeping the upwind air from pushing against the fan, but letting the hot air vent out the top and bottom of the tents. After that, we had no temperature issues at all.

I haven't seen all of the new season, so haven't found where the downtown footage we shot has been used yet, but we did the desert background plates for these shots:

As well as the arrival of the train to the city, shot on the 134 going up and down the hill between Glendale and Eagle Rock, as seen in these shots:

It was a pretty fun shoot and interesting in that we shot these before the main unit had even started filming the show, whereas I'm used to us shooting either concurrent with the main unit or, for a lot of the network TV shows that shoot their cars on green screen, well after they've shot their episode.

Pivoting plates

We shot a car stunt scene for the Fox television show Pivoting last year and the episode (episode 2) has aired, so I can finally share some behind the scenes with you. While we normally use a larger camera vehicle (you can see pictures in many of my past posts), this one required some precision driving as there was traffic and a car stunt, so we rigged up a Porsche with three Komodos, two on hard mounts with Zeiss CP2 25mm lenses and one on a Ronin 2 in the center with a Sigma Cine 14mm. Because there was a hard u-turn, which caused the Ronin to swing to the side, we had to be conscientious of our placement so we wouldn't crash the moving camera into the stationary one to the side.

The local PD closed down a few blocks of street for us and we had a stunt coordinator making sure all the picture vehicles were correctly timed. This was nice as it takes some of the load off of our driver, who typically coordinates directly with the PD for our smaller, non-stunt driven shoots. This is also one of the few times we shot with the main unit, as most of the time we are shooting completely separate from 1st unit.

The best part is that the main feature of the stunt (a car skidding to a stop as they cut it off during the u-turn) didn't even make the edit since it would have been visible out the side or rear windows, but they cut to a forward facing shot instead! Oh well. At least the background plates we shot got used for when they're talking inside the moving car.

Please excuse the mediocre quality of my screenshots, as I had to take them off my computer screen with my phone, so they aren't as high of quality as I usually get.