Have another blog post installment for everyone. We have DP Ryan Thomas and really fun commercial he shot using some S-60 skypanels and other RGB units from Bolt. Check it out!

I have been wanting to shoot a colorful, yet moody commercial for some time and was really excited when Director Spencer Selover and I came up with the idea for this Spec piece. The overall idea was simple enough, a girl getting ready for a party, but using her new Phillips Hue bulbs to create a new look in her space.



When we came up with the idea we had to keep budget in mind. This was something that was going to be a personal project and all in we only had about $3,000 for the two day shoot. We were able to call in our favors to get an all star crew, as well as take whatever gear we needed from Bolt that wasn’t working that weekend. Most the money ended up going towards the location, camera package, and of course feeding the crew.



Style

The product comes with a pretty obvious style attached to it, this thing had to be COLORFUL. Not only that but Spencer and I wanted to give it a moody stylized feel along with that. I wanted to avoid the solid walls of color and instead just place pockets of it amongst the scene. I was lucky enough that a lot of the LED RGB’s from Bolt Lighting Rental were not out the weekend that we shot and I was able to grab them along with a small truck.



Luckily I had a lot of tools from Bolt at our disposal and were able to get a solid RGB LED arsenal that was going to be crucial to achieving the look.



We shot on the Alexa Classic and Zeiss Superspeeds, for lighting we had the following:



2 Arri S-60 Skypanels with Chimeras

4 Dedolights

2 750w Arri Open Faces with Chimeras and Control Grids

15’ RGB LED Litegear Ribbon

1 Arri L7-C

2 Source 4 Lekos

2 2k Dimmer Packs

1 Luminair Setup



Originally we had planned on getting a loft space that was much more clean and polished, but as it came closer to shooting all of those locations were just too far out of our budget. The warehouse loft space we ended up with was actually great, but because of it’s style, we ended up tweaking ours a bit. We opted to go all handheld and ditched the Fisher 10 we had reserved and decided to add a set of Classic Soft filters to soften the sharpness from our super speeds we had rented.



I had our Production Designer, Paul Velasquez, search for some interesting practicals that would give us a variety of quality throughout the room. One of which was a 6’ long cantilevered practical that was as fantastic as it was ridiculous. We would start the spot with her normal lighting setup and slowly transition to our final reveal of the space with the colored bulbs. Once we had the practicals in, we would use the dedolights and Hue bulbs to pepper in accents, making sure that she had a variety of different colored hair lights and following her with a soft key as she walked around the space. Fill was not something we used too often, as we liked the moody vibe.

Opening Wide



Our first wide on the 18mm, we had put 211’s, or 75w Photofloods, in all of the practicals and squeezed them down on dimmers to taste.



-Key was a dedolight rigged in the ceiling bounced off the beams dialed far down to give a warm glow. The Christmas lights gave us a bit of help as well.



-Dedolight with 250 half white diffusion to the right of her edging along her right arm.



-L7 coming through a set of stairs on the right side dialed to a cool blue to mimic a cool industrial light from outside.



-Dedolight rigged behind her to extend the lamp on the table next to it.



-Skypanel bounced off the wall camera right and dialed to a cool blue to fill in our shadows. You can see what this is doing on the beam at the top of the frame. I always love doing this because it creates an interesting yet subtle color contrast in the scene.



-12×12 Solids clipped to the windows outside to black out everything.



We also added a classic soft filter to give a slight halo to the Christmas lights in frame.



So far we had achieved the pockets of light we were going for, but once those Christmas lights came down it was time for us to get into color where things got a little more tricky…



Close Up

For the close up we had some interesting challenges as we had to keep the light changing on her as she decided on a look, but not go overboard on how it would affect her face.



-Key was a sky panel double diffused through 4×4 frames of Opal and 216.

-S-60 sky panel bounced off the right wall in “Party” mode and the speed set to it’s lowest setting. This gave us slowly changing colors without us having to control it.

-Dedolight rigged overhead gelled double blue acting as a hair light that just spilled onto her shoulders. We were so focused on our RGB fixtures that we hadn’t really thought to bring party gels. Would have loved them for this fixture!

-Phillips Hue Bulb in a socket outside against the window to give us more depth.

-L7 is still there, although subtle! There was a small room to the right of the steps that we used to shoot the light through the steps. I don’t think that light changed much throughout the whole shoot.



I knew if we just blacked out the windows with a few 12×12 solids we could keep a consistent look and provide some interest outside when necessary. I will do anything possible to not shoot at night, as it makes everything more difficult. Harder to get crew, harder for locations, and of course hard to stay awake. This was really the only shot where we had to put something out there to keep the exterior from being a black hole, otherwise the blacked out windows worked perfectly.



Final Wide



We spent quite a bit of time getting this shot just right, but it was definitely worth it. My favorite was a touch by our Ryan Moore, our gaffer for the 2nd day, who put a Daylight Photoflood (BCA) in the strangest practical Paul was able to find. It’s on the bookshelf on the left and was just 100’s of blue and green straws with a socket in the middle. It was such a small detail, but helped to add more color contrast.



All the practicals at this point had the Phillips Hue bulbs. From some prior test we found that if we had dialed the Alexa to 181 Degree shutter we could eliminate pretty much all the flicker from these bulbs.



-Key was an S-60 Skypanel on the landing of the stairs.



-Kept the L7 coming through the stairs to add some color contrast in the scene.



-RGB Ribbon behind the couch to give an interesting glow on the back wall.



-Source 4 Bounced into the ceiling from the right. This is what’s creating the cool glow through the slats by the crossbeam.



-Dedolight rigged on the beams in the back left of the room to give a little tungsten push into the room.



-Kept the S-60 bouncing off the back wall dialed to a cool blue.



We actually ended up having the gaffer download the Phillips Hue app on his phone, along with having Chris, our actor, control another light from her phone in the shot, so we could give this feeling as if she was changing the whole scene at once trying to settle in on her look. We shot a few different colored looks that gave us a lot of freedom in the edit.

All in all, this was a really interesting experiment in using some household RGB lights along with the professional standards and I think there were a few people after the shoot that were already thinking about adding these to their kit. Special thanks to all of the crew that came out to work on this project and make it happen, they really made it great.



Click for full video.

Enjoy!

Credits

Director: Spencer Selover @cerlov

DP: Ryan Thomas @rdthomas

Gaffer (Day 1): Matt Stouppe @boltlightingrental_inc

Gaffer (Day 2): Ryan Moore @bullshifter