Cinematography Breakdown - The Truth I'm Standing On - Part 1
In the previous post, I went into detail about the overall making-of the music video. Now here’s how we captured a couple of looks from the piece.
INTERIOR PERFORMANCE
The interior performance took a lot of time to get right, as far as looks go. We wound up needing both of our powerhouse lights outside the windows, a lot of neg to block out unwanted light, and quite a bit of haze. We also added an Aputure in the interior to fill out a bit of the space we’d lost when negging the room.
I wanted a fairly backlit, silhouette-heavy look for Leanna as we were still at a point in the song that fit that mood in my opinion. Once we’d get to our exterior was when I wanted a vibrant and less dark atmosphere. Later in the song I warmed up the color of this interior in post since at that point in the edit it could match the warmth of the exterior (hence one of the frames below looking more warm than the rest).
We shot this on a Panasonic EVA 1 on vintage Canon glass. I lived on the 35 the entire day. Honestly the 35 has been my favorite for some time - as it stays flattering when you push in for close-ups (rather than going fish-eye if you were on a wider lens) and still can show the space if you pull out. It feels incredibly versatile and I always find myself going back to it. While I didn’t push to have this shot’s white balance as cool as the rest of the interiors, I still believe I had us shoot around ~5000 K to keep the sunlight ever so slightly blue. I didn’t want this to feel too warm.
INT STAIRWAY
The interior stairway wasn’t as much of a key location as the interior performance however it wound up being my favorite look in the end.
The space was incredibly small, and above the stairs were just more rooms and a hallway. There was no light at all coming from windows - and the tungsten sources were just gross. This meant our m18’s were unusable, too since we couldn’t get them inside. Also I mean even if there had been windows we had no real way of getting the m18’s up to a second floor’s height either so… yeah.
I tasked the gaffer with the job of creating the appearance of windows casting hard light through the railings so that we could have some shape on the wall to the left of the frame and behind Leanna. I’ve started to take more notice lately of adding shapes onto flat walls in order to give them more dimension. I guess now it sounds like an obvious thing to be aware of within your toolkit but I was painfully unaware of it for a long time. Had we not added something there, the entire space would have felt much more flat and given no motivation to her being backlit. We wound up using the 300d and a titan panel to get enough light to create the look I was wanting.
Again I used the 35mm on the EVA 1. It was really, really tight in that small space but thankfully the leading lines of the stairwell make the space feel less cramped that it did in person.
For the close-up of Leanna we also had someone walk in and hollywood a tube that was wrapped in muslin, just to give her a little more fill on the face.
