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Filed under: Cameras •Lighting •Production •

Anatomy of a Porsche Spec Spot

After our first rehearsal it became clear that we needed to hide a light in the car itself. Alan Hereford offered a battery powered LED light that he’d picked up at Walmart as an experiment. It was the perfect color to emulate the cool blue/purple light one sees in high-end car dashboards. It was a small ring light, and we hung it off C-47’s attached to the heating vents on the dashboard. It ran off four AA batteries.

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Alan Hereford’s LED ring light adds a high-tech glow to the interior of the Porsche. The stop sign in the background is lit by the 1k open-face hidden behind the building and will be removed in post. Notice that the two street lights to the left of the stop sign show vertical smears: that’s an artifact of the F35’s striped-sensor technology and reminds me of a vertical anamorphic flare.

The first shot was a close-up of three people being dragged to the car. We shot the two women separately because they didn’t overlap (they would be separated into different elements later), and then shot the guy separately. We did a number of passes: first they just sat there, then they stood up and sat down abruptly, and then they pushed themselves away from the car. All these elements would be sped up, blurred, and occasionally reversed in order to create one shot where they were dragged to the car as if by a magnet.

We ran into a little bit of a problem in post: as we were shooting the guy’s plate the one overhead building light that we couldn’t reach shut down, apparently due to a headlight hitting a daylight sensor. For a short time we were afraid we’d have to shoot all the women’s plates again in order to match the new lighting. Fortunately the building light re-ignited within a minute or two but took a while coming up to speed, and as we were pressed for time we shot as soon as the color of the light looked stable. In post we found out it wasn’t quite up to speed yet, and there was a slight color shift that was visible on the white hood of the car. If it wasn’t for our white car we never would have noticed the difference. That plate will require a small amount of color correction to make it match the others.

This is why, when doing multiple passes on a scene for VFX work, it’s good to control every light in and around the shot—assuming, of course, that you have a budget that can buy you the manpower and tools to do so.

After that we shot a master of the car pulling up and repeated a number of elements of our three main talent being dragged to the car. And after that we lowered the camera and shot another angle of the same actions again.

Hidden in plain sight: That black object you see tucked against the wall in the bottom left of frame is one of our Kino Flos. No one will ever know what it is.

Last but not least we shot the end shot, or the punch line of the spot.

We started setting up in daylight, around 5pm, and started shooting around 7:30. We were finished by 11:30, thanks to a little help from my friends and co-workers.

Berkeley police drove past us five times while we were shooting, and I was fairly sure we were going to get busted for shooting on the sidewalk without a permit or aiming bright lights into the street. They never bothered us. On my way home I drove around the block and discovered that there was an actual club (as opposed to our fake club) on the next street over, and that was what the cops were watching. It was only through great force of will that I drove around, and not over, the hundred or more people who had spontaneously decided that 8th Street was their living room.

We recorded all the footage via HD-SDI to a Panasonic HPM-110 P2 deck, using the AVC-Intra codec. The spot is currently in post and I hope to be able to show you the finished piece in a week’s time.

While I shot a couple of behind-the-scenes photos for this article, the majority were shot by Rod Williams. Thanks, Rod!

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Thanks so much Art for writing this piece up, and to Rod for the photographs. I’m very eager to see the final piece in HD; you’ve built up the suspense well. Cheers!

Posted by Christopher Ruffell  on  03/06  at  12:23 AM

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