By frequent request I’m going to break down the bar scene in a recent music video I shot with the amazing director Patricia (Trish) Kaube. Trish brought a unique vision to this project and it was a blast making it come to life. Shoots like these are why I became a cinematographer: building worlds and crafting images.

I recently posted this on /r/cinematography and it started a great conversation. When I shot that first scene I was a greenhorn when it came to lighting and framing – more or less everything. There was no real depth to the shot, the actors were crammed into a corner and the light was coming from – everywhere. What was I thinking? Well I was working it to my best intentions, but lacked the experience at the time and most of all the understanding of what light is. You can read more about this topic in my blog post about how to light from reference.

I think this comparison shows how much framing, depth and especially good lighting can make an image come to life.

We were going for a dinky smoky Berlin bar past midnight. The location was amazing and at ground level. My gaffer and I darkened the room entirely with the window blinds and turned on all practical lights. I walked around the location with my gaffer Philipp Fechner and got into the atmosphere and analyzed the possibilities to enhance or augment the lighting that we saw.

We knew that Trish wanted the actors to move from the back of the bar up and behind the counter. So that was quite the distance to cover. Our lighting package was two 1x1 LED Astras, a 4ft 4bank, an Arrisun 5 and two oldschool soviet 1,2kw HMIs – I swear they must have shot Russian propaganda with those things, they are ancient.

We set up the 1,2Ks outside to camera right and hazed the room. The 1,2Ks however didn’t pack the punch we needed and adding to that they were constantly tripping the circuit. Like I said – ancient HMIs. So we made due with an Arrisun 5 and set it in front of the window. The lamp really gave us those cool blue streaks. I set the white balance to 4300K, so that the light from outside would read blue and the tungsten lighting inside wouldn’t be too orange.