Back this Summer, I had the pleasure of working with director Tony Kim and creative director Steven Baillie on a music video for the artist Michi Soza. They had a great concept for a neo-60’s look, shooting at a mid-century motel on the Jersey Shore. Just a great team and a fun visually striking concept. We had a last minute location change, but as is often the case, you have to be prepared to deal with the unexpected.
Some constraints were we didn’t have much time, only about 4-5 hours with the talent.. due to team schedules, time for HMU, travel times, etc. So I had to be able to quickly build this myself (no crew on this either), shoot it and get everything out in the same evening.
The tools here are two Amaran F21c’s (a great RGBW, flexible 2x1 panel from Aputure), one Aputure 60x (with a red gel) and three Aputure B7c’s for practicals. The idea for the color palette was to go triadic.. red, yellow & blue (or cheated slightly to red, yellow-orange & blue-cyan). There was also a working, vintage CRT television that we used as both a prop and a light source. The original location had green walls (hence the green in the sketch below), interestingly enough the new location had blue title walls. There was a plan to do a blue hued bathroom moment, but we killed it for the new location, as the bathroom there wasn’t great and we wanted to get outside and do some exterior shots.
This was shooting on the Sony FX6 using the dual base ISO at 12800. That’s one of the things I really love about that camera, you can get a great image at a high ISO using just practicals, low power LED’s and ambient light. I don’t think this really would have worked if we were stuck at 800. I used mostly the Sony GM 50mm f1.4 and there were a couple of gimbal shots outside with the Sony 16-35mm f4.. Focus was via AF, which for our purposes worked fine.
When we changed to the new location, I adapted the original lighting design and landed with something like this..
As you can see, it’s very similar. We have a gel’ed 60x making a red swash of light across the bed. Our moveable key light is the Amaran 21c set to a blue-cyan color (same for the bathroom area). I used the B7c’s in the existing room lamps set to yellow and we have our CRT TV casting a white-blue glow. The one addition is that this room had a small balcony with a view of the nearby boardwalk. Here I added a Quasar Q10Ls with a red gel and we propped the door open, so we had the city lights in the background. We shot mostly in that direction for depth.
Overall, it’s a dynamic scenario, where the talent can move around the room though pools of different color light. Everything is small enough to quickly move around the room or battery operated to eliminate some cords. It’s always nice to have more time to dial things in, but there’s nothing overly fussy here. The client was happy and it’s a great lighting look that I plan to keep honing. Thanks for reading!
Link to more stills and the final video are here.