CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
A little ditty based on (I think) an actual Amazon review.
We shot this in a stage in LA that was JUST big enough. It had a three sided cove, and we set up the main living set in one corner so that we could get the wide shot that ends the piece. The large billboard was set up in another corner, and the sets almost overlapped. Like I said--just big enough.
The walls and floor were all painted white and we were able to provide the thematic green they had used in previous spots via a series of Colorblast LED units hung from the grid. We had a 12x12 softbox above the main living room area and another over the "exterior" outside the windows. Three medium Chimeras hung roughly in a row created the back and side key for the male subject, while the sunlight effect was provided either by a 10K hung in the very back corner of the grid or a row of 8 par cans. I used the 10K when the shot was wide enough to see the floor pattern, to keep it clean, and switched over to the pars for medium to tight shots of the female character as they gave a nicer wrap.
It was a bit of a wrestling match hanging the banner inbetween the various lighting units, something of a negotiation, but the grips made it all work ably!
For the wide shot at the end we shot well off the set at the top, and due to the grid being relatively low (20 ft), the lights hung down into nearly half the frame, a few feet above the banner. These were all removed by VFX.
We then moved over to the big billboard shots, which were somewhat simpler to execute. A 12x12 softbox overhead and a 12x20 source off to the right for the first two, replaced by a 10K raking in hard for the moon shot. We had a gag where the 10K was mounted onto the dolly so we could boom it up to recreate a sunrise on the moon, but it wasn't used in the edit.
Camera was an Arri Amira shooting 4K ProRes. Lenses were my set of Aluras. I used a light grade of Black Diffusion FX (probably 1/2).
We had a lot of setups so it was a fast and furious kind of day!
