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.

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.

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.

Free - A Mosaic Film Performance

This is a project I shot a few years back that I thought I had lost the final video. I was going through some old hard drives the other day, however, and came across it, so I thought I'd share.

I love shooting in black and white. I also love shooting in odd aspect ratios, so this is one of those times the two coincided. We shot the project on a RED Epic MX, which is a color sensor. To get a better idea of how it would play in black and white, I merely turned the saturation all the way down to give us a black and white image while the color information was retained in the R3D file. We shot in widescreen, but created custom frame lines to give us a 3:1 guide for our final aspect ratio. The whole thing was shot gorilla style, with only a bounce board to help shape light. Shooting black and white also helps with that, as you can shoot a bit harsher light than you would in color and it will look good as long as you get the image properly exposed.

Story-wise, this was to be exhibited as part of a live performance, with the protagonists leaping off the screen at the end of the film and onto the stage to perform a dance routine (with the faceless people as background dancers). It was pretty cool to see this exhibited as a hybrid film/live performance piece.

Free - A Mosaic Film Performance from Kyle Wright on Vimeo.

A few more screen grabs

And here's a few more screen grabs from my shoot in Indiana.

Also, I spent this past week working on a shoot out in Palm Springs. We shot primarily outdoors for four days, with the temperature getting as high as 115° F! So how did we keep cool(er)? By grabbing a pool umbrella and creating a makeshift camera cart mobile shade station!

May update

Since it's been a while since my last post, I'll just update with the most recent, as most of my jobs the past two months have been simple things like interviews and some event coverage, so nothing too exciting. This week, however, I worked on a pretty fun suspense/horror project.

I just got back from Indiana, where I shot some test footage for a possible feature with Lionsgate. We shot a couple scenes over two days for a script they had optioned. This was one of my first shoots where I had to hire an entirely local crew, but I managed to find some great people to come on board.

When choosing a camera, we decided to shoot on the Alexa Mini, as I had it on a gimbal for quite a few shots and needed to use a camera that was lightweight enough for the Ronin. I had also considered a RED Dragon, but knowing that we would be shooting a bunch of night scenes and only having a 1-ton G&E van package for lighting, I went with the Alexa as it offers a pretty clean image at ISO 800 and 1280. Keeping in mind the need to stay lightweight and wanting some vintage softness, I opted to use a Zeiss Super Speed Mk3 lens set and I aimed for a T2 (+/- a half stop) to get a little softness in the image with shallow depth of field.

For being a quick shoot with a minimal crew and lighting, I'm pretty happy with the images we got. While waiting around the airport for my flight back home, I did a quick color grade in Photoshop from some screen grabs I snapped of the Log C footage, so these aren't necessarily representative of the final color grade.

Tech specs:

Alexa Mini
Zeiss Super Speeds Mk 3
ProRes 4444 Log C
3.2K framed for 1.85:1 final image

Nike Run Club spot

Working with director of photography Chris Saul, I b-camera operated and second unit DP'd this spot for Nike. It's the one that's playing in Nike stores and was shot in the "sideways" 9x16 aspect ratio for use on the store displays, which utilize screens with this same orientation. We had a lot of fun and I'm happy to be able to now share the finished video.


NIKE from Chris Saul on Vimeo.

Nike store - The Grove Mall, Los Angeles

Last August I posted about a Nike shoot I worked on. I had heard that it was playing in stores a couple months back and finally had some time to make it down to the local Nike store to check it out. Oddly enough, I couldn't find it playing on any of their tall aspect ratio store screens (which all seemed to be displaying shopping portals, not video), but a cropped version was playing on the giant wall of screens right behind the checkout.

It was pretty cool to see some of the stuff I shot on that big of a screen. I just wish I could have seen it the way it was originally intended to be displayed. I know it was shown in the full tall aspect ratio at another store, as the main unit DP showed me a picture, so perhaps I need to drop by a different location. Either way, it's still cool to see my work playing at Nike.

Nike Store at The Grove.

Sorry for the terrible color balance. I took this with my phone.

More Nike BTS

Our key grip Gino Nix sent me a few behind the scenes pictures he took of me at work on the Nike shoot, so I thought I'd share. A-Cam Op/DP was Chris Saul. B-Cam Op/2nd Unit DP was me.

Me (left) and Chris Saul (right) on the gator about to chase some the runners.

Me (left), director Martin Desmond Roe (center), and Chris Saul (right) talking through our next shot.

About to shoot off of the gator while standing.

Shooting with the Ronin in the rain, I decided to be my own umbrella operator.

About to pursue some runners through the street after a wetdown.