Shooting My First Sneaker Commercial ( In-depth Cinematography Breakdown)

this thing on it's like a game show host today happy Wednesday everyone today we're going to do a little cinematography breakdown on my most recent spec project that I dpd from my buddy Pat Uh for this little shoe commercial that he cooked up and it was a super super fun job so without further Ado let's roll the uh the spot here and then we'll kind of get into the nitty-gritty of how we did it [Applause] [Music] [Music] bro you're late get in the booth so that was the 30 second spot I'm super happy with it I hope P super happy with it as well getting into this project so we shot this over 3 days as we had three very different locations uh we had Chinatown we had the house location and we had the studio location uh because this was a spec project we did have the luxury of splitting that up over 3 days and not having to cram everything into one day so that was super nice and very stress reducing that we were able to kind of spread those things out so we could have more time on each day day one was our house location and in pre-production Pat had told me that the look he was kind of going for was a warm kind of commercial feel uh that felt kind of vintage because the shoes that we were doing the commercial 4 were vintage shoes obviously lighting was going to play a huge role in getting that kind of warm commercial look but honestly I'd say 80% of the look here was created by the location itself self and the production and set design like I talked about in my short film breakdown that I posted a couple months ago production design and location are the most important part of your project uh if you shoot it in a location that doesn't match what the vibe of your project is or doesn't have you know interest to it it's not going to look good it's not going to look like a real commercial so location set design props it is the most important thing and so because of that we brought on the absolute best uh set stylist production designer Liz she is incredible I've worked with her a couple times now and every time she knocks out of the park and this was no different uh we sent her some references of kind of what we were feeling for the vibe and told her the idea of the commercial and then she kind of went off and sourced all of the props that we could literally have ever wanted right down to like a vintage TV that we would have on the counter that matched our color scheme and these like really cool old vintage uh Rolling Stone magazines which worked perfectly for uh some of our insert shots so without these props and and the set deck and the the proper placement of all these things this project would have looked nowhere near as good and as professional as it does so 100% whenever you're doing any sort of project bring a set designer a set stylist someone like lizon to handle this for you because they will make you look much better at your job than you actually are moving into the lighting for the house we already talked about the kind of couch portion uh in the how to light a daylight interior video so I'm going to skip over that here um and we'll go right to the TV shots uh for these shots starting with our lights that we had outside outside this window on the right here we had a Nova p300 C just kind of blasting through coming through the shears and giving kind of a nice soft key to the front of our TV uh in the window right behind there kind of that door window we had a 300X with the reflector dish on it and then another I think 600x with a spotlight mount on it that way we could kind of put that to have little streaks and highlights wherever we wanted and then the one the reflector dish was kind of just streaking in and kind of giving more Ambience to our space and also giving some nice specular highlights all over the background on that stove the wall and kind of all the the things in that area right there and also highlighting him as he kind of runs through the space and out that door outside the back window we had a Nova P600 C and that was just to light up the shears and kind of bring them to a level where we weren't really seeing anything outside of them but we weren't clipping the window after getting all the lights set up outside I realized we were kind of having a major problem and that was the windows weren't feeling very warm even though we were using the exact same settings on lights that we had in the uh couch scene where he was sitting on the couch and nothing had changed between that scene and here with the lights and so I was kind of like why why is it looking like this but then I realized it was because uh for the living room scene where he was sitting on the couch there was an alley outside where those lights were coming through so there was no really ambient daylight kind of streaming in through those windows so our lights even though they were smaller were really able to kind of completely drown out that ambient daylight whereas with the lights now on the back of the house uh it was fully open to the rest of the world so we were getting a lot of that ambient daylight spill coming in at 5600 Kelvin um and and that was making our Windows feel much cooler than uh the other scene so at first I was like oo I don't really know how to deal with this but uh after after thinking for a second I came up with the idea to raise our camera whitee balance to 9,000 de and that kind of counteracted the daylight of 5600 and made it feel super warm uh and then we just matched all our lights to 5600 instead of 3200 and that gave an almost identical feel to the other scene so it ended up working out super super nicely so if you're ever in a scene where you need to kind of make your daylight fixtures or the daylight outside feel kind of like that sunsetting warm feel try boosting your white balance up to somewhere around 9,000 and it may work for you it worked for for us here so from there inside we had a 1200d bouncing into the ceiling with a spotlight mount on it just to kind of give us our our room tone here and then for the TV itself uh just a couple more lights we added there we had a uh pavos slim 12C boomed out over top of the TV uh with the Grid on just to kind of give a nice top light to it kind of wrap the light around the TV from that window that was on the side uh and then on the side of the TV the left side of it uh we had our gaffer Vin put up a 60c with a spotlight mount on it and bladed in so it's just hitting the the side of the TV there kind of feeling like it's that sun from the window in the back just kind of edging out the TV a little bit more and just kind of helping to add that that three-dimensional shape to the image which honestly adding that light was my favorite light that we added to this and it really kind of made it it pop which I was I was super pleased with moving into the product shots of the isoe what we did for these is it was a really really minimal lighting setup uh it was now in the bedroom at the front of the house and so outside that front window we had a 200x I believe just with a reflector dish on there set to 3200 Kelvin uh just blasting through that window through the shears kind of giving a mixture of a a soft and a hard key uh cuz the shears were parted just slightly uh so it's giving some nice specular highlights on the shoe but also giving a nice Ambience to the space uh from there we added a pavos slin 12C over top of the shoes to kind of make sure that they were getting lit properly and having a nice you know soft wrap around the shoe because this is our product this is what we're trying to display here so even though we kind of wanted a little more contrast in in our scenes uh we wanted to make sure that the shoe was properly lit and were're able to see the details of the shoe because that's what we're really trying to to sell here is the shoe uh from there it was looking pretty nice we could have left it as is but uh I wanted to add a little more Dimension to the scene so from there we added a 60c with a spotlight Mount and just kind of had a gaffer slash on the bed like right behind where his his shoes were and this was just because it it felt like we were kind of falling a little flat just because we were right up against that bed and so to add some contrast and make it feel like there was a bit more depth there we added that slash just across like behind his his legs there uh and then the only other thing that we added for this scene was a Pavo tube just kind of in the corner um off like 3/4 uh to the right of the shoes um and that was just to kind of help accentuate that that edge on the side of the shoe and really make it pop and then and then we ended up using that lighting setup pretty much for all the other insert shots in this room and that was pretty much it for day one everything has gone wrong but we're making it go right that's right moving into day two we shot this in Chinatown in New York City and the reason we chose to shoot it here was because going into this uh we had talked about you know this was going to be a large portion of the commercial these these running sequences um and we wanted that to still feel at the same level of quality and polish that we had our our you know first scene and our last scene being uh so we wanted to have you know nice set design nice lighting uh just nice location and you know because we were doing this gorilla Style with zero budget we weren't able to kind of bring any of that stuff in for these large outdoor scenes so we needed to kind of have a location that all of that stuff could already kind of be there and Chinatown worked perfectly for that it has a bunch of super interesting architecture and lamps and lanterns and uh you know cool buildings and Alleyways where the sun kind of streaks through so it it pretty much was a just kind of show up and spray it down kind of area and any direction you look looked pretty cool so that's why we ended up choosing to shoot in uh New York City Chinatown instead of shooting closer to us in in Philly and like I just mentioned we weren't really able to light anything in these uh outdoor shots because you know we were kind of stealing these shots from in front of businesses and on streets and we didn't have permits for any of this so as kind of just show up get the shot get out so uh knowing that in pre-production we went and scattered all these locations and found out where in each of these locations the light would be the absolute best at what time of day and uh then we work backwards from our shot list to kind of to figure out what time we would show up at these locations to make sure that each shot we were getting was in the most optimal lighting of that location now did we actually end up nailing that perfectly no actually when we showed up on the day to shoot uh the main area that we had planned to shoot in was shut down for a Netflix movie that was filming there so that was super fun and and panic inducing when we we got there and our our main location was unavailable to us so uh luckily our camera operator and gimbal operator Nick Brady who is a fantastic cinematog grapher and also happens to live in the area kind of save the day here and uh we fully went off script and we're like all right Nick where are some cool areas around here that we can shoot these shots in and he kind of led the way and showed us to a bunch of cool locations where we were still able to get the shots that we needed and uh you know they still still looked cool so thank you so much nick uh you kind of saved that day so on the topic of camera operators uh like I just said we had Nick who was our camera operator and gimbal operator uh he rode his skateboard all day and kind of tracked along with Malcolm to get all of the tracking shots that we needed he did some handheld on a skateboard some with the Gimbal and good God that man can skateboard I could never do that if I tried so he was absolutely crucial to to getting this done and getting these uh nice smooth tracking shots and and weaving in and out of traffic while doing so so if you ever need someone who is able to ride a skateboard and also Dodge traffic and also film at the same time Nick is your guy I'll link his social somewhere on the screen here literally all of our camera Raptors that day were straight Killers uh we had two other camera Raptors on that day as well uh Kyle daa and James Hargrove uh they both are fantastic DPS and we asked them to come on to shoot textures of the city for us throughout that day because going into this project another thing that we had talked about is that we were going to need a lot of footage to make a 30-second Montage you know and we needed a lot of kind of textural elements that weren't necessarily our main shots to kind of weave all of our main shots together and uh I kind of knew that we probably wouldn't have enough time kind of with getting all of the the main shots that we needed and knowing that we were going to probably need to do multiple takes of each one of those shots due to having to pause for traffic and people walking through cuz you know we didn't have permission to kind of close down any streets or anything so it was going to be a lot of hurry up and wait and redo redo redo and so I was really nervous about being able to get all of the main shots that we needed and all the textural shots so uh we decided to bring on two other camera operators and they absolutely killed it and they basically just went around all day and recorded pigeons and buildings and any of those cool little whoosh things that you saw like that was all them and they killed it and really brought this project together so thank you guys for for coming on and absolutely killing the game another thing we did to kind of help with the speed of shooting is that we had two aam rigs uh we had a handheld rig and a gimbal rig uh both were fx3s and the reason we did this was to kind of you know make sure that we were able to get all of our main shots handheld and all our main shots uh gimbal because we wanted to have a variety of different styles of takes that way in the edit if Pat wanted something more gritty more fast-paced he could use a handhel take or if he wanted to kind of show off the shoe a little bit more or kind of make you sit and and kind of feel whatever the moment is that's happening we had the the gimbal longer takes as well so this was super nice to be able to kind of give him this variety to play with in the edit overall for kind of how it started the day with uh our main location being shut down to a movie being filmed I think New York went pretty well uh moving into our final day day three of production our studio day uh we ended up shooting this at a studio on Drex University's campus and oh boy it was just a nightmare to lock down we eventually got it locked down through someone that got connected with Pat who was a music Major at Drexel University and they were able to book the studio for us but uh you know we aren't Drexel students obviously so we weren't really allowed to be using this um so we kind of had to go in with very minimal gear and kind of just augment what was already naturally there lighting wise so for this reason I rated the fx3 at 12,800 to make all of our lights kind of act as much bigger fixtures than they actually were to make sure we were lighting the whole space and not just kind of uh little portions of it so getting into the lighting for the this uh the first light we set up was our kind of inframe practical that bar light that you see uh kind of above the uh the window there and uh originally I was going to put a tube light up there but my uh amazing gaffer cam he suggested instead uh we used 12 uh like aperture MC's just put next to each other uh because they have magnets on the back of them and because that metal frame is metal it is magnetic so we were able to attach all of them kind of just up there right across and it was much easier than trying to rig a tube blade up there without like kind of seeing how it was Rigg so this is why you bring people that are more talented in you on to give you ideas like this that you would never think of so thank you Cam for that oh I should also mention that uh we set uh all those MCS to 3200 Kelvin like we will set all the other lights in the space cuz we wanted to match the warm look that we had in our opening scene uh moving into the next light that we set up we set up a nanlite papos slim 12C uh with the Grid on it boomed out overhead uh just off to the right a little bit of our main Talent producer guy uh and the reason for that was we wanted to give a nice soft toppy pool of Light Above him but we wanted to still have a shadow side so we pulled it just off to the right a little bit to kind of maintain that shadow on his back to give us some some nice contrast uh the next light that we added in here and I think it was the final light that we added in here was uh two Pabo tubes one on either side of the mixing board uh with foam noodles on them to make them even softer and then black wrap them to keep it off the walls and just create this really nice big pool of light kind of extending that light from that bar of light uh over top of the window uh to really light up all those dials and buttons nicely moving to the other side of the mirror where our guy Malcolm is uh to key him we used a aperture 200x with a spotlight mount on it and just blasted him in the face with it now you know you may be saying like why did you key him with hard light and the reason for that is because this is you know a project rooted in music and performance I thought that you know stage lights are very similar to uh you know Spotlight mounts so uh I wanted to kind of give it that feel because of the the themes of this project of it being kind of music related I thought kind of stage lighting would play nicely for this and it looked really nice so uh we just blasted him in the face with that hard light and that gave us a nice key uh and then to kind of separate him from the background we had a f2x on his shadow side at a slightly cooler color temperature uh 4500 Kelvin just to to give us some nice color separation and just separation overall from the background give him a nice hairl and a nice Edge and then the only Le light we added for this wide shot here on Malcolm uh was these two little practical bulbs up above his head um they were actually already there but one of them was missing a bulb so we threw an MC in there and matched it to the other 3200 just house bulb practical that was there and that kind of framed his head out nicely kind of frame within a frame and just gave us some nice specular highlights which are always welcomed so uh that's all we did for the wide shot and I think it looked really nice moving into the uh close-up shot of the producer and all the macros of the dials and buttons and stuff we used the exact same lighting setup we just move the lights in closer uh and then for all the macro stuff I Ed my my trusty Amazon diopters and and we just ran around with a pavos slim just to topl everything and uh you know got in super close and got all those nice little little buttons turning and little little I don't know whatever this thing is moving it was it was all cool stuff so uh again that this speaks to you know making sure your location looks really nice because we didn't add any of this stuff it was just already here which makes our job of making things look cool super simple because all we have to do is just run around with a camera and pretty much any direction you point is going to look good so make sure you're getting a quality location and not just you know getting the first thing that pops up really take your time and finding your locations moving into the final product shot of the shoes uh we didn't really change anything from the wide shot for Malcolm's angle uh the only thing we added was a twop net kind of taking the light down on his shoes a little bit because originally the shot was a Warner uh booming up from the shoes to him wrapping and uh to key that we just used that Spotlight Mount and had cam on the back of it and just tilted it up as I boomed up with the camera uh and this worked really great it looked really nice but the shoes were much brighter than his face because the shoes uh were almost white and his face is a little bit of a darker complexion so to balance those out we used a two-stop net to just take down that that light and make sure that both felt like they were properly exposed oh and then we also did add a uh 4ft tube just in front of his shoes that also boomed up with him just to kind of wrap that light around his face and make sure our our shadows were just getting a little kiss of light because again even though we wanted it to feel dark and have very deep Shadows we wanted to make sure we weren't clipping any of our values oh and I forgot another thing too we also had another light mat over in the back corner there over top of that amp just to give it a little bit of of level and kind of out in the background so in the shoe shot it give us a little B more depth and dimension in the background and that was pretty much it for the cinematography I know this is already a very long video but real quick like I like to do in all of my videos I want to talk a little bit about what I would do differently if I had the chance to do this project again for the house scene off the top of my head the the things that kind of stick out to me is that uh those pushing shots of his face I would probably add a 4X frame in front of our key light uh just to knock out the uh the Reflections in his forehead a little bit just that's from the key light being a little bit small so making it slightly bigger would probably help to knock out those those Reflections a little bit and then I probably also wrap it with a tube light with a foam noodle on it just to give our shadows a little little bit more uh lift cuz I still want them dark but I think they're maybe a tad bit too dark now uh and then probably also just turn up the hairl just a little bit uh just to get a little bit more more pepper on the top of his head and maybe get a little more exposure on the the ear and the the headphone for the New York day if we're talking about like we have this exact same budget level we can't we can't really change much CU we're not you know blocking out streets and putting up giant lights like we just we can't really change much to it I think the only things I change is in addition to having Nick have just a skateboard I'd love to have an ebike um I think that would make it much more easy to get repeatable shots um because with the skateboard you know we're not necessarily getting the exact same shot over and over and over again there's always a little bit of variance between them and I think having kind of an ebike where we can control the exact speed between takes might help to get uh the same shot over and over again and get our takes a little more precise but that's super nitpicky but I think it probably help to make each shot or each take a little bit more accurate matching to the one previous if that makes sense finally for the studio day um I would have softened the closeup of our producer a little bit uh it just feels a little bit harsh because again we didn't bring any for by fusions we were trying to keep everything very light very small um so that's just kind of the pavos slim hitting his face and it's a little bit too small of a source for me uh I still think this looks great but I would again want just a slightly bigger Source just to kind of make it feel a little bit more soft and wrap around the face a little bit more and then the only other thing I would change from the studio day was just that shot that we did kind of booming up from the shoes to his head uh I'd probably choose to do that on gimbal rather than handheld just because the handheld felt maybe a little bit too jarring for a product shot also I think I'd probably try to experiment with using a little bit of haze in that room to kind of get a nice beam out of the Leo and just give us a nice little little little bit of atmosphere in the space so maybe next time I'll mess around with that overall I'm extremely pleased with how this turned out and I'm just so incredibly grateful to have such an amazing group of of talented creative friends who are always willing to to jump on and create something just for the hell of it and you know I just don't think there's there's anything cooler than than having a group of friends who are just always down to create stuff so hopefully you got something from this incredibly long ram of a video if not my apologies and uh I'll see you next week bye your Skin's blowing bro yo stop geke keeping that cologne bro huh stop geke keeping that cologne what cologne the one you always wear man what I don't I don't have any or right now or yeah that's Irish Spring baby you know what I'm saying

Channel: Carsten Schlag

Views: 7,344

Keywords: FX3, Sony FX3, Cinematography, Commercial, Filmmaking, Cameras, Sony

Id: gC1QQUGNjTM

Length: 20min 24sec (1224 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2024