Not often you get the pleasure to film with amazing actors. In this occasion, we were witness of an amazing show! Adrian Lester and Danny Sapani, two big names at the Almeida Theater. The live-stream was produced by Studio North South and I enjoyed every minute of this work. It’s been challenging but rewarding on a high level. Our crew of 4 camera ops did 2 days of rehearsal before filming for the preview show, then we had 4 days of live-streaming, delivering the same quality and same shots, day after day.

We filmed with 4 Sony FX9 rigged for studio setup, using Zeiss 70-200 lenses for the side views, Angenieux Zoom for the steadicam and a Fujinon Premista 28-100 for the centre camera. Thanks to an amazing job Matt Hargraves and colleague William Knights did ahead of the show, we had a pretty smooth week.

You can find reviews of the show here

BBC - Guardian - The Times - Telegraph - Evening Standard - iNews - Whatsonstage

Photo credits: Marc Brenner

You can still watch it on-demand on the Almeida Website and you can have a look at the Q&A we filmed after the first show. Hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did!

It’s a very challenging moment for everyone in our industry. With rules changing every week or so and COVID-19 numbers scarily going up every day, it’s difficult to find jobs and have consistency and keep up with good quality jobs.

I’m very pleased I had the chance to work on the latest music video for XADI feat. NINA COBHAM - Manana. Shot in one day, 3 different locations and a small budget, we managed to pull out a nice looking series of frames. I’m very pleased with what we got considering a big challenge with the weather and lots of last-minute changes.

More important, I’m very pleased I got the chance to work alongside nice people and we spent a nice day together, going through every scene with a nice crew attitude and good mood.

We shot with the same setup I tested a few months ago:

• Sony FX9 (sensor on 16:9, Cinetone)

• Atlas Orion Set B Anamorphic (cropped to 2:39:1)

• Set of Schneider Hollywood Black magic filters

All kit has been supplied by Shootblue, they never miss a chance to be pure legends! Thank you guys!

Big thank you to Xadi, Nina, iluvlive production, Caleb Mapoma (Director), Dominka (1st AC), Nicolas (Cam trainee), Sachin (Gaffer) and everyone else that helped on set!

Here some of the BTS shots, looking forward to publish the final edit soon! Stay tuned!

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HOW DO YOU SHOOT A CAR COMMERCIAL?

As people asked me a lot of questions regarding the lighting and more details about the shoot, I decided to write down a post about the creative process, lighting choices and the various challenges that are behind this film:

Unfortunately, because of the cancellation of the first part of the F1 Season due to Covid-19 and the forfeit from the major sponsor, Williams Racing had to create another livery for the car and make another film for the car reveal so this is not the official film anymore but it went online on February 2020 as the official car reveals for the Formula1 season 2020. It did get some pretty good reviews, so shout out to everyone involved in the production process, especially Director Jonathan Donnelly @ RD Content who believed in the vision I had and Andrew Griffin @ RD Content for making it happen!

Creative process

We started with gathering a few ideas and discussing about the creative approach. One of the film we came across was the “AUDI - Cooling Down” film, directed by Dan DiFelice, DOP Sebastian Blenkov.

You can read more about this project here.

Taking inspirations from the film we wanted to create something similar, with a strong use of sound design and lighting.

We didn’t have enough time to get a motion control arm setup on set and we didn’t have time for post-production team to work on 3D details or animations, so we needed to find a different direction.

We decided to film a single-shot sequence and use moving-head lights in order to enhance the firing up of the car. Then, reveal the new livery in its beauty with a full view of the car. The basic idea was that shoot two different takes: the first part needed to present the car in silhouette, with lighting and sound creating a suspense, the second part needed to reveal the new livery.

Animatic

An F1 car is a very delicate and desired object, especially ahead of the Barcelona Testing weeks. We wanted to get the best out of our time with the car, so we created a 3D animation to replicate the camera movement and start planning how many shots and time we needed on set and for post-production. When we finished the 3D animation we sent it to our sound designer, who started building the soundtrack based on that.

Lighting

While working on sound, we started talking about Lighting: we wanted the first part to give a sense of contrast and raw power, while the second one could be smooth and focused on the details of the car.

We took references about the studio we were going to use (Junction Elen studios) and the kind of lighting setup that we could have in place and how to move them between take one and take two. We also started to build some sort of practical light for the background in order to give a bit more depth in the first shot, using Astera Titan Tubes.

We also started to build some lighting previews for the client, in order to get the sign off on the lighting quotes. We created some simple scenarios for the first part of the film with Cinema4D and Cinetracer so we could have a pretty good idea of the space and the camera movement as well.

Lighting setup

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Camera

I decided to shoot with the Alexa Mini LF on steadicam, Open gate format, RAW. The reason why I decided to go for this format was that we needed enough DOF for the background and because we needed to deliver different formats: 2:39:1, 16:9, 1:1 and 9:16 for Instagram. Shooting Open Gate allowed us to get enough margin to then crop the image as we wanted in post.

We also started to do some tests in studio with the steadicam in order to get the timing right.

Shooting day

On shooting day, we arrived at Junction Eleven studios around 10 PM, waiting for the car to arrive around 2 AM. The key was to give us enough time to rehears multiple times and test different lighting setups.

The shoot was planned in order to have the car for at least 8 hours, but we ended up having it only 4 hours. We then needed to get back home and start editing, grade the film in order to deliver it 2 days after. Our initial strategy really paid off as we manage to get everything in the right place when the car arrived and we started to shoot straight away.

First shot

I filmed some BTS images during the first part of the shoot, have a look at the video below. As you can see, we started practising with two tables in the middle of the studio. Then, when the car arrived, we managed to get a few takes with different lighting setups so we could have a choice in the post-production process.

Second Shot

After we nailed the first shot, we had to quickly change the lighting setup for the second part of the film. We used two ARRI 5K for the ultra bounce polyboard on top of the car, other two ARRI 5K for the front and one ARRI T5 for the background. In order to have the kind of beauty shot we had in mind, we needed a soft-top source and a bright floor in front of the car to separate it from the background.

In this case, the lighting setup was pretty easy, the difficult part was to shoot starting from the full view of the car and finishing on the rear wheel, the priority was to have a good looking end frame. In this way, we then had to reverse the shot in post-production and match the timing with our animatic reference.

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We finished filming around 7am, right in time to hand-over the studio for the stills session. The car then departed to Barcelona, for the 2020 Spring test session at Circuit de Montmelo. I’m pretty happy with the final result, especially because we managed to organize every aspect of the filming and be prepared for any inconvenience ahead of the shoot. Shout out to Director Johnny Donnelly, Andrew Griffin, Jeff Clark, Dominika Besinska and Jake Morris for the hard work on set!

Last but not least, find the equipment list below:

• Camera: ARRI Mini LF

• Lenses: FF High Speed Prime Line - 35mm, 40mm, 50mm

• Focus: RT motion mk1

• Field Monitor: SmallHD 503 Ultrabright

• Client Monitor: Atomos SUMO 19

• Wireless remote: Teradek Bolt 500

• 2x Titan Tubes 8 Kit

• 4x ARRI 5K

• 2x ARRI T5

• 8x 4x4 Folding Black Flag

• Various C-stands, heavy duty C-stands, heavy duty wind up, sand bags.