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Filed under: Cameras •Production •Tips •Training •

Phantom Adventures: 1000fps on a Budget

This was our last setup of the shoot, and it promised to be a tough one. How could I light a set bright enough to see slow motion detail while keeping it dark enough for the projector image to look real? (The projector image is a post effect, by the way.)

Originally I’d thought about bouncing light off the tablecloth from above, but I opted not to do this for a number of reasons. Bouncing light off a low flat surface, like a table, is a great way to quickly light a space and make it look real. Soft uplight looks great on people placed around the table, and the glow from the table’s surface drops off quickly which helps create a sense of space and volume. Hard lights and lights with beams are wonderful tools for lighting at a distance and bringing out texture, but soft bounces and lights that simply glow define a space because they create soft areas of light that people and things can pass through. You can “feel” where they are in relation to objects and people in the frame.

But I didn’t do that.

I wasn’t sure I could hang enough lights over the table to get the amount of bounce light needed so instead I opted for two Maxibrutes popped over the back wall of the set and aimed through diffusion. I had some qualms about this as I wanted to keep the soft light from spilling down the wall; fortunately I had an excellent grip crew who took care of that for me. (This was a great opportunity for me to not have all the answers. I simply told my grips what I wanted, but not how to do it, and they did it faster and better than if I’d told them what to do. That’s an important thing to learn: hire good crew, tell them what you want, and get out of their way.)

The fill light is another Maxibrute, gelled with half CTS (Color Temperature Straw) and pushed through an 8’x8’ frame of grid cloth. CTS is a tough gel to work with in HD as it often “tips” over into green. Strong oranges are the same way. Yellow and orange are awfully close to green on a vectorscope and many cameras will accentuate that relationship in unpleasant ways. Fortunately the Phantom didn’t have this problem with this strength of CTS gel.

It’s nice that the fill is coming from the left as it blends nicely with the blue light on the left side of big brother’s face and then drops off into shadow on the right, giving him a bit of shape.

The window lights are 10k’s gelled with a combination of full CTO and half CTS. I first read about this formula in the American Cinematographer article about the movie “Fargo,” where the DP (Roger Deakins) sought to emulate sodium vapor lighting using tungsten units. The rich orange color really conveys the sense of streetlights outside a window.

Little brother was the focus of the shot and I wanted to pop him out from the others with an additional light. The most obvious motivated light source was the projector, but there was no way I could hide a light near the projector lens that would light the boy but not light the wall. (The wall had to remain dark so the video projector image, added later in post, appeared plausibly contrasty.) I opted instead to bounce a Firestarter par gelled with full CTB off a silver card taped to the floor. The blueish color sold the idea that he was being lit by spill from the projector, and even though the light was coming from below it was still coming from roughly the same direction as the projector and felt very natural.

The Firestarter par on the right is gelled with full CTB and bouncing off a silver card to light big brother. Our fill light, a Maxibrute through 8’x8’ full grid and gelled with 1/2 CTS, is behind Jono.

Faking a ceiling: here a menace arm holds a practical light in the proper position. The various flags and nets were necessary to control burned-out highlights as we were lighting the scene from behind and had to dodge a number of bright white and shiny surfaces. The Rec 709 output of the Phantom is not nearly as forgiving as raw mode is, but that was a different budget.

Noise shows best in flat even surfaces, and DIT Jay Farrington noticed that the flat wall showed more noise than it did in any of our other shots. In order to reduce the amount of noise we changed the camera’s ISO to 160 and dropped our frame rate to 500 or 600fps. This didn’t reduce the noise at all, but as the shot didn’t contain as much dramatic motion as the others we opted to keep the frame rate anyway.

We went back to 1000fps for these two shots, which were completely gratuitous but really cool. These were primarily lit with a Maxibrute through thick diffusion (one or two frames of Lee 216) in order to create a nice soft highlight in the side of the pot. The liquid picked up the light nicely and looked a bit like liquid gold. The portion of the image containing the projector is a freeze frame as we discovered it didn’t put out red, green and blue light simultaneously. Instead it flickered through each color as it painted the frame with red, green and blue light in rapid sequence. Although the effect was very pretty it was also distracting.

Double-diffusing the light to create a nice clean highlight on the tea pot.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you learned something new and interesting. This was a great learning experience for me, and I’m fortunate to have been able to pick the brains of a number of experienced colleagues before taking this shoot on. I also had a great crew to lean on, which is always the key to success.

“RAMBUS XDR”

Regional Spot (Northern California)

Production Company: Compass Rose Media

Director: Jono Schaferkotter

Production Manager: Vanessa Tomasello

Executive Producer: Steve Weisser

DP: Art Adams

DIT: Jay Farrington

Gaffer: Luke Seerveld

Electricians: Alan Steinheimer & Ernie Kunze

Grips: Todd Stoneman & Jeff Nealon

Production Designer: Mykael Merryweather

Camera: Chater Camera

Thanks are due Luke Seerveld, for a ton of great stills, and to Compass Rose Media, for their behind-the-scenes Flip camera footage.

Art Adams is a DP who likes to shoot quickly, even in slow motion. His website is at www.artadamsdp.com.

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