Friday, November 21, 2008

Lighting Advice for Budding DPs

Art Adams | 11/21- 08:15 AM

Wherein I realize I’m finally wise enough to give lighting advice to others

Not long ago a student asked me a question that on its surface seemed very simple: “How do DPs approach lighting a set?”

Sunday, November 16, 2008

My First Shoot with the Sony F35

Art Adams | 11/16- 06:41 PM

In which a series of tests becomes the fastest spec spot shoot in history

About a week and a half ago I received an email from Leigh Blicher, partner at Videofax in San Francisco. “Just wanted to let you know our F35 has arrived.” My response read something like this: “Ooo! Oh! Oh oh oh! Ooooo oh oh OH! Oh! OHHHHH! Can I come over and PLAY?”

Friday, November 14, 2008

The RED Outdoors

Art Adams | 11/14- 01:44 PM

This spot would have been hell if I hadn’t used the RED

This spot was part of a web campaign for California’s No on Prop 8 campaign. In my previous article I wrote about another No on Prop 8 that we shot in four hours on a Sunday afternoon. This is what we shot in the morning. It’s all one take, which is pretty rare for a spot.

The contrast was fairly extreme. I’d say the actors were a stop underexposed at EI 160 (which is how I rate the RED) and the background was four or five stops hot. A polarizer took care of a lot of the heat coming from the swaths of sunlight raking through the background, and as long as I only clipped one channel (typically green) I found that I didn’t lose much detail.

When we scouted this location my big concern was light. We had no lighting instruments that were big enough to back way off and light an 80’ walk. I’m not sure we even had power for a 1200 PAR in this beautiful Oakland park. The director, Tom Donald, wanted the women to walk around a bend in the path, and when I stood on that spot I couldn’t see any source of light other than sunlight hitting green leaves. Green sucks up a lot of light, and leaves are green. Not a good combination for flesh tone against a sunlit background.

I walked a bit further along the trail and, lo, the branches parted before me and I saw a big patch of blue sky. Sky is a light source, and it’s far enough away that its exposure isn’t going to change over an 80’ walk… hmmm.

I talked Tom into letting me shoot this with the patch of blue sky over the camera position and, once I told him my reason, he readily agreed. I was a little worried about the color of the light (skylight being blue and all) but I figured I’d “fix it in post.”

On the day of the shoot the only tweaking I did was to have two grips walk along the side of the hill with an 8x8 silk, following the actors. Some of the sunlight they walked through was too intense, and the moving 8x8 smoothed all of that out nicely.

We shot this on an 85mm lens at about T4. I tried white balancing at one point and the camera maxed out at 10,000k--so I put it quickly back into 5600k preset.

When I did the rough cut for this project I simply picked the take Tom wanted and ran it through RedCine, white balancing using the color picker on the white timecode slate. Then I exported the take into ProRes, brought it into Final Cut and did the rest of the color correcting in Magic Bullet Looks.

The flesh tones look very good to me. There are some blue reflections here and there but that feels natural. Whenever I’ve shot under extreme color conditions and tried to bring it back to normal, it’s not unusual to be able to correct the skin tones while the reflections in the skin skew toward the color of the source. Maybe that’s because the sky itself is bluer than the light it emits by the time the light reaches the actors.

One other interesting thing: as the background highlights went out of focus they dropped in brightness by about a stop. The only explanation that comes to mind is that the highlight loses intensity as it blurs and spreads. It certainly was a welcome accident in this situation. (The lens was an 85mm Zeiss Super Speed.)

My camera assistant, Phil Bowen, nailed every single take.

I’m glad we used the RED for this. Director Tom Donald is completely sold on this camera now, and in the past he’s been a hardcore film buff. It’s nice when technology catches up with expectations.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Lighting Simply for the RED

Art Adams | 11/13- 01:23 PM

Two PARs, a couple of bounce cards and some grid cloth make this spot shine

A while back I posted a Quicktime movie of this project, shot for the California “No on Prop 8” campaign. At the time I promised that lighting diagrams would be along shortly. I lied. I just got around to this today.

Friday, October 17, 2008

The HVX-200 Strikes Again

Art Adams | 10/17- 04:46 PM

In which I present the results of a spec job that I wrote up a while back on PVC

A while back I wrote an article about a spec shoot I did promoting an as-yet unfunded motion picture project. For various reasons the project wasn’t finished, so I took it upon myself to cut the footage into a short piece for my reel. I mixed in some footage from a light drawing test that we did for the same project using a Canon DSLR.

Monday, September 29, 2008

I Decide: Anatomy of a No-Budget HD Spot

Art Adams | 09/29- 02:35 PM

Wherein a great group of people come together for a good cause

This was the first project shot for California’s No on Prop 8 campaign. In an attempt to reach out to young voters I recruited my cousin Catherine, and her best friend Austin, to record an appeal for youth to get up and vote down Prop 8. They’re both politically active and immediately said “yes” to the project.

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