Shooting two TVC’s in one location is a great idea but especially challenging if each commercial require a completely different look, lighting wise. One look being bright, sunny, warm and soft, the other - dark, stormy, contrasty and…”realistically night time”. That last part always scares me - I’ll come back to that.

I co-shot this series of commercials with the very talented cinematographer Mark Kuilenburg, almost a year ago. It was our first time working together as a kind of gaffer/cinematographer/creative duo. I mention that because looking back, I guess I was trying to prove myself and make a good impression. We Recce’d, shot listed and planned this shoot together, but Mark left the lighting up to me and I was (now that I think about it) OVERLY confident in suggesting that we should shoot the night-time stuff…during the day.

“Yeah! We’ll just black the windows and throw a light through the front door!….DONE!”

Not only night time, but we also had to emulate lightening and rain on the windows, as if there was a storm outside. Nothing too crazy of course, but with a tiny crew and limited time it wasn’t a breezy setup. I’ll come back to that too….

If you’ve ever caroused through my lighting setups over the years, you may have thought to yourself “who has the time, or the imagination to create a lighting set-up like this before a shoot?” And the answer is, not me. NONE of these setup’s were done - to that level of finesse - before a shoot. I might sketch a lighting plan on the back of a napkin after a recce, but it inevitably changes on the day. Just like this one did :) The diagram you see below is me spending hours creating little icons and basically designing a poster. It’s as accurate as I can do in Photoshop hehe…but hopefully gives you an idea of how I light stuff.

SO! Back to the “realistically night time” part. It scares me because often people have inaccurate ideas about how night scenes actually look on screen. Sure they can FEEL like night time, but there still needs to be light, and there’s often a LOT of it - especially for a TVC. The difference is that it’s well controlled and the ambient light is low. That, and the fundamental idea that the scene is at least “lit” by a practical. That could be a fire place, or a lamp, a TV, an iPad, headlights, or candles….which you can then enhance further with your own film lights, keep spill off the walls and create realistic lighting that makes it FEEL like night time. So, on this TVC? Nope. This shoot was written with the power-lines being down. No house or street power. They left me with the dreaded idea that MOON LIGHT would light the interior of the house. Oh, and a green tinted LED torch that was as bright as black hole.