“... Camera set.”

Finally found the time to write this up! This was a TV ad shoot for Chips Away, a national franchise you can call up and have any nasty scratches on your car fixed on your own driveway. The production company was Koala TV, and the director Neil Scholes. Fortunate to have on board increasingly-regular focus puller Jason Cuddy and DIT Tom Mitchell.

The brief was for a very bright, punchy cinematic look, and it seemed like another good opportunity to get the RED camera on board. ¬†It was the first RED experience for the producer and director. ¬†Kit came from Shoot HD, who’ve put together an absolutely cracking package with all the extra bits and pieces that make a huge difference on set. ¬†The kit included a set of 6 Ultra Primes – my first go with these lenses – and amongst other toys, an IDX CamWave wireless HD-SDI link which meant the 17″ Panasonic director/client monitor was physically disconnected from the camera, making moving stuff around a huge amount easier, but benefiting from an uncompressed HD-SDI signal with no noticeable delay.

The Shoot HD kit also came beautifully flightcased, which makes a massive difference to the camera assistants’ quality of life and instantly lets you know that it’s all going to have been extremely well looked after.

As usual I rated the camera at ISO250 for a slightly cleaner image, and used Tiffen IR-cut NDs and a polariser in front of the lens to give a stop for everything of T/2.0 on this extremely sunny day.

For the exteriors I used a couple of 4×4′ frames with half white diffusion to take the edge off the very harsh sun working as a backlight (if you look in the reflection of the car windows you can actually see them – would have been much better to use a single 12×12′ but would have required more crew to rig), and then a 4×4′ silver reflected to bounce the sun back in as an edge light for the closeups.

For the interiors the director was after the feeling of morning sun streaming through the windows, so we used a little fine haze in the air to give the light a touch of volume, and lower the contrast of the scene. ¬†Supplementing the sun (we’d scheduled the shot using my Helios sun calculator to make sure the sun was at the most advantageous position for this scene) were two 2.5KW HMIs with 1/4 CTO to warm them slightly. ¬†All the strong directional light you can see on the back cupboards if from the HMIs. ¬†The sun was coming from a much more acute angle and we had to put in a few nets to take down the hot spots on the windowsill. ¬†Ideally, we’d have boxed out the whole window from the sun, leaving just one side clear where you can see the other house, and just used the HMIs to create the sunlight so we’d have more control, but again it would have taken longer than we had.

For the closeups I put a 4×4′ KinoFlo with daylight tubes and full white diffusion just out of frame. ¬†To hold the detail outside the window I had several stops of ND in and the polariser too to pop the blue skies a little so any artificial light that was to make any difference at all had to basically be on top of the actress.

For the scene at the door, I hid a 1.2 KW HMI inside the hallway to suggest light from the kitchen in the rear backlighting her hair, then bounced a 2.5KW HMI from the kitchen floor up into the kitchen ceiling to brighten up the back of the shot. ¬†For his shot, we faked the same 3/4 backlight the sun had been giving us in the wide shot (which was done at a different location) using a 2.5K and a 4×4 reflector. ¬†For both shots the ‘key’ light on the actors’ faces was just the natural bounce at the location.

DIT Tom Mitchell had brought in a full DIT kit from 4K London and was able to cut together a rough version of the ad before we’d barely begun packing up – nice bit of proof for anyone who claims RED takes longer than any other format!

The offline was cut using ProRes files debayered at quarter res to 1024 x 576px, then colourist Simox Cox at Fullrange Films went back to the original r3d raw files in Color for the final grade, which is where the pictures above come from.

Thanks to Tom, we also got some DoP Diary cam stuff going!

And not only *that*, we even took loads of behind the scene stills…