A Mix of Film and HD Doesn’t Scare Arri’s Alexa

The client wanted contrasty toplight against seamless white, and then they wanted to intercut that with stock footage shot on film. Thanks to Arri's Alexa, what the client wants--the client gets. In spades.

I've done a number of different styles of lighting against white limbo backgrounds: flat frontal, rear 3/4, big soft source from the side... but when creative director Justin Curtis of agency GYRO:HSR told me he wanted contrasty lighting from above, I was intrigued. Many assume that because the background is white limbo the foreground lighting has to be big and bright, so it was refreshing to hear someone say that they wanted dark noir toplight.

Watch the video first, and then I'll talk about how we did this.



Just for the record, I think this is brilliantly cut, and I love the sound design. It's very clean and tastefully done.

A significant portion of this piece is stock footage shot on film, so it was great luck that we were able to land an Arri Alexa for this shoot. I'm both happy and sad to say that the Alexa is the film killer: sad because--well, it's the film killer; but happy that we have a camera like this to take its place. Because the Alexa is such a filmic-looking camera I don't feel a shift in visual styles between the Alexa footage and the intercut stock footage.

The project had to be finished in a week--the ProRes4444 footage went straight from the stage to an editing room at Teak Digital where worked started on it that night--and while there was talk of a color grade we opted to shoot in Rec 709 and get as close to the look in-camera as possible.



We nailed it. There was zero post color correction.

When I was first told about the dolly shot, which was to be one continuous shot from full body to tight closeup, I immediately broke out PCam and did some calculations. The calculations told me I had to do a 20' dolly move on 24' of track to make this shot work. (The extra 4' gave the dolly a place to sit at the start of the move.) That influenced our choice of stages. We ended up at Bayshore Studios in San Francisco.

I knew that I wanted to be slightly wide for the closeup; I wasn't going for beauty but for drama, so it felt right to make the talent's face a little rounder in the closeup. Years ago, while working as second camera assistant on Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, I overhead DP Jim Carter say that the 35mm focal length lens was quite possibly the perfect lens. Later I heard a story from another DP, Robert Gagnier, who told me that when he'd shot a soap-type episodic series in the early 80s the production company allowed him two lenses for the entire shoot: a 10-1 zoom, and a 35mm prime in case the zoom broke. It seemed that a lot of people liked the 35mm focal length, and over time I've learned that it really is a great all-around lens: just wide enough to be interesting, not so wide as to be unpleasant on closeups.



We booked a set of Ultra Primes with the Alexa, and as I suspected we'd only need one lens for the entire project I opted to drop a long lens in favor of a shorter one. The normal set consists of 16mm, 24mm, 32mm, 50mm, 85mm and 100mm, and I opted to drop the 100mm in favor of a 40mm. While 35mm felt like the right lens for the closeup, the 32mm in this set felt a little too wide--and, sure enough, when I looked at the shot on the day the talent's face bulged a little too much. We put up the 40mm lens and the closeup was perfect.

Once the logistics of the move had been figured out we worked on the lighting. White limbo is one of the hardest things to light well because it's very difficult to light a large surface evenly. Most often we use an array of 2k space lights for a small job like this, but a cluster of space lights will still cast a number of shadows, particularly around the talent's feet. Gaffer Charles Griswald suggested we suspend a 20'x20' frame of light grid cloth under the space lights, which worked perfectly. I embellished upon his suggestion by pointing out that there was no longer any need to hang the silk baskets on the space lights, so we rigged the light grid cloth underneath a series of naked 2k space lights and took advantage of the extra punch. There was some spill light that caused shadows around the edges of the frame but as long as the spill didn't occur behind the talent we didn't worry about it. That kind of thing is easy to fix as long as it doesn't happen behind the talent. If the talent crosses in front of it, though, the fix will require rotoscoping instead of just slapping some flat white over the shadows. That costs more time and more money, which is not a good thing. That wasn't a worry here as the shadows occurred at the very edges of the frame, and only on the wide shot.

It's always important to know the parameters of what you need to accomplish. If the project had to be delivered the next day, without any post cleanup, then we would have lit the stage evenly from side to side. As that wasn't the case we made the background perfectly even behind the talent, knowing that the edges of the white could be easily cleaned up in post. I did check with post first just to make sure they were good with that kind of cleanup, as I didn't want to make those kinds of decisions for someone else as they're the ones who have to deal with my choices later. It's always good to think about the next person down the production chain.

The Alexa did wonderful things with the bright, soft reflections of the overhead light in the talent's forehead. I could have created roughly this same look with another camera but I would have had to add more fill light and a one-stop polarizer to keep those reflections from blowing out. The Alexa just handled them, the way a film stock would.

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