#My camera quality is so shit this is a flash photo btw

[axiigotlost]

Ethryn doodles before I go to bed. I love my babygirl

[joshandrus]

Part -2 Lighting & The Build

Initial lighting diagram of The Taken

BTS pre-production of “The Taken” with Josh Andrus and Ruby Bird Studio.

When Kit and I drew our lighting diagram, we knew we would have to make some adjustments once our hypothetical idea got put into practice.

Josh and Kit starting the set build - Blacked out the windows and now we're preparing our c-stand crossbar to hang our Matthews 20x20 duvetin. Hollywood Stunts hooked us up with the trampoline. 

One thing we didn't think we’d have to do is replace all our light sources in the 11 hour as The Gap moved in to a studio in Manhattan for their latest campaign (which is brilliant BTW), and rented EVERY SINGLE BRONCOLOR SCORO PACK IN NYC.

That foiled our plan of show casing these brilliant power packs with crazy high flash duration and 3200 watts of juice, to freeze every single bit of motion for our series of nano-second alien abductions.  We thought about rigging a pulley system on the beams in the studio and suspending people, but I insisted on a trampoline. NOT a small kids or cross fit kind, I wanted a 10′ or a 12′ backyard trampoline - one that could support adults flipping around and turning themselves upside-down. (see my over zealous sketches) Photo shoots are all about the energy and I look for the pulse of the room and I exploit it to get the shots I want. No pulley system was going to showcase the animated backstories I’d created for the actors. Plus, how could I get the anti gravity lift-off I was seeing in my head? Do it in post?!? NLOL.... 

I stuck to my gut and kept on path, even when during the shoot the entire crew wanted me to compromise the upside-down, falling up a flight of steps, slipping on a banana peel caricature because of a slight - lets say indiscretion that caused the trampoline to side 2 feet with every jump. (No one was hurt and everyone had a shit ton of fun.) 

At any rate....

We had to scramble the night before prelight to figure out a new plan to light the project and get the gear to do so - Our buddies, the two John’s over at Scheimpflug came to our rescue with 5 Profoto 8a packs and heads, a Joleko 1600 and a monster fog machine so we could augment our lighting and not have two weeks of preproduction come to a screeching halt.

Scheimpflug sponsored the Profoto lighting, continuous lighting and grip. 

The spot/overhead strobe with fog and the trampoline The 20x20 in the background also make a great staging area, hence the light on coming from behind it.

We had to shift our goal of showing the performance of both Hasselblad and Broncolor together, and solely focus on Hasselblad.

#monster

Image Quality, High Performance, Phocus software, 16 bit color, high-speed wifi, higher ISO range with the 100MP CMOS sensor, and the touchscreen display would keep us plenty busy - all that and a 1/800th sync on the leaf shutter gave us a fighting change of freezing the motion of our subjects with the less powerful (and longer flash duration) Pro8 Packs without bi-tube heads.

#beastmode

This also gave us an opportunity to expand the subjects environment a bit more than we had originally planned, as these images were initially thought of as portraits with a hint of an environment, and not an environmental portrait.

That being said, we should've shot it on grey or white rather than black to make it easier to comp the subjects and background during retouching - The fog helped make it a bit easier than if the background was a deep black, but still cutting hair out like that is a nightmare. I’ll talk more about this later on...

On to the lighting!!

Our set up was pretty basic - we needed to have a top light to mimic the alien beam that would eventually be lifting the subjects - and we needed to have accent lights/kickers around to mimic ambient light of the scene they’re in.

View from behind the H6D 100mp - this is before the flag have been added to block the rear kickers from firing directly into the camera.

Since this was a hyperreal and a stylized series of images, we weren't trying to make the light “real world believable”.  A top lit scene that would look heavily contrasted, something like this;

Kiera in the 1600 Joleko that we used for the plates of the beam.

Good for pissing about and making funny videos late night, but not great for what we were trying to do.

We had to bring the overall light reading of the room up so the shadows were getting hit with flash, filling in the details and helping freeze the subject as they were in motion.  We decided on building a 12′x12′ light bank out v-flats and a 12′x12′ china silk. This would live behind me as I shot and act like a parabolic umbrella, but would allow us to add more lights inside if needed to, and we did...

Inside of our 12′x12′ homemade soft box  fill light - 4 V-Flats and soon to be a pro-8 pack and one head to keep the flash duration fast to freeze motion - it definitely wasn't enough power for the flash duration needed.

Video still inside of the finished 12'x12' -  We had to add two D1 1000s at a lower power setting to bring up the fill - two more strobes than we planned on. We also had to lower the Pro-8 pack to increase the flash duration. 

The finished light bank behind me during day 1 or shooting - there’s a Carmine’s pizza box in the lower right of the frame and now I want pizza.

We wanted to give the face and body a pop of light so there would be detail in the shadows, so Kit and I decided on a hand held strobe with a snoot. Kit would follow the subject as they jumped around so no matter where they ended up on the trampoline, they were lit. 

Kit is fuckin’ good...

Kit on a ladder. 

Kit at a safe distance.

Kit doesn’t always need a ladder for height to get around the boom.

That coat was a few thousand dollars - Amy has good taste. 

Add fog, an FX fan with random probability and a badass crew, and that’s basically how we created the portraits for the series.

Mica getting subbed out.

Becca running the fan, fog, computer and basically anything that needed solved. #rockstar 

Everyone made fun of my outfit, but why would they expect anything less?

Next post I’ll show more images of us shooting, a larger version of the lighting diagram and then on to the backplates and compositing!