Danny McIvor's Photo A lonely young widow packs up her house preparing to move out after the death of her husband. As she fills the moving boxes she comes across photos of her married life and the photos come alive with the memories of happy days past. For those who are interested- The technical stuff: Our production design called for two very distinct "looks" for this MV. The woman wandering through the house alone and packing her moving boxes called for a palette of blues which we accomplished by using the power of the RED Digital Cinema RAW format which allowed us to change the color temperature of the daytime scenes just slightly by adjusting the kelvin settings in the REDCINE X color correction and transcoding program into the cooler end of the spectrum. Someone suggested we balance the camera for tungsten and then shoot under daylight but we felt it wiser to balance for daylight and then play around with the color later. We also used a lightly blue gelled HMI outside the windows but tried to use natural window light as much as possible. Luckily many of the rooms we shot in faced north. For the nighttime scene the big HMI light was gelled with a Cinegel # 83 Blue. We tried other shades of blue and during testing found this to be the best for our purposes. The HMI acted as the main light source for the scene and was placed outside the large living room windows and was bright enough to light up the whole room at about f4 on the Zeiss lens and f2.8 on the RED lens. We augmented that light using smaller 250W pro lights gelled with CT blue. Unfortunately in these BTS photos they don't look as blue as they actually were. To emphasize the woman's solitude with did the last nighttime living room shot with a wide 14mm Zeiss lens which made the room look huge and made the woman (Diana) look very small in a dramatic shot that dollied back from a MS to a WS and revealed her sitting in the corner of the now empty room. For the memory scenes the palette had to be warm, cozy and happy with lots of reds, oranges and yellows. We used a Tiffin 0.5 Pro mist filter on the camera to take the edge off the RED's legendary sharpness and a #1 Tiffen Coral filter (made famous in those desert scenes in Breaking Bad) to give every shot an overall warm feeling. For these daytime "memory" scenes we gelled the HMI with Cinegel #3408 (warm) for the afternoon scenes and left the light un-gelled for the midday scenes letting the coral filter on the camera give the shots the subtle color on its own. All the photo frames contained green screen inserts which will allow each still photo to come alive as a living memory of happy times in the woman's marriage. These created challenges. When she took a photo out of, in one scene a drawer and in another, one of the packing boxes, Diana had to be careful not to allow the camera to see any of the green insert. But by far the biggest problem was during the shooting of the scene in the photo above. Green screen keying requires a good level of even light on the green. Even though the surface was non reflective, it still bounced green back onto Diana's face and hands when she held up the photo to look at it, which would have made keying in post difficult to say the least. It took a lot of positioning in these over the shoulder shots of the green photo frames to make sure there was no green spill on her face which you could see part of in the framing of this shot. — with Diana Rosalind Goldman. #863874785120100809
A lonely young widow packs up her house preparing to move out after the death of her husband. As she fills the moving boxes she comes across photos of her married life and the photos come alive with the memories of happy days past. For those who are interested- The technical stuff: Our production design called for two very distinct "looks" for this MV. The woman wandering through the house alone and packing her moving boxes called for a palette of blues which we accomplished by using the power of the RED Digital Cinema RAW format which allowed us to change the color temperature of the daytime scenes just slightly by adjusting the kelvin settings in the REDCINE X color correction and transcoding program into the cooler end of the spectrum. Someone suggested we balance the camera for tungsten and then shoot under daylight but we felt it wiser to balance for daylight and then play around with the color later. We also used a lightly blue gelled HMI outside the windows but tried to use natural window light as much as possible. Luckily many of the rooms we shot in faced north. For the nighttime scene the big HMI light was gelled with a Cinegel # 83 Blue. We tried other shades of blue and during testing found this to be the best for our purposes. The HMI acted as the main light source for the scene and was placed outside the large living room windows and was bright enough to light up the whole room at about f4 on the Zeiss lens and f2.8 on the RED lens. We augmented that light using smaller 250W pro lights gelled with CT blue. Unfortunately in these BTS photos they don't look as blue as they actually were. To emphasize the woman's solitude with did the last nighttime living room shot with a wide 14mm Zeiss lens which made the room look huge and made the woman (Diana) look very small in a dramatic shot that dollied back from a MS to a WS and revealed her sitting in the corner of the now empty room. For the memory scenes the palette had to be warm, cozy and happy with lots of reds, oranges and yellows. We used a Tiffin 0.5 Pro mist filter on the camera to take the edge off the RED's legendary sharpness and a #1 Tiffen Coral filter (made famous in those desert scenes in Breaking Bad) to give every shot an overall warm feeling. For these daytime "memory" scenes we gelled the HMI with Cinegel #3408 (warm) for the afternoon scenes and left the light un-gelled for the midday scenes letting the coral filter on the camera give the shots the subtle color on its own. All the photo frames contained green screen inserts which will allow each still photo to come alive as a living memory of happy times in the woman's marriage. These created challenges. When she took a photo out of, in one scene a drawer and in another, one of the packing boxes, Diana had to be careful not to allow the camera to see any of the green insert. But by far the biggest problem was during the shooting of the scene in the photo above. Green screen keying requires a good level of even light on the green. Even though the surface was non reflective, it still bounced green back onto Diana's face and hands when she held up the photo to look at it, which would have made keying in post difficult to say the least. It took a lot of positioning in these over the shoulder shots of the green photo frames to make sure there was no green spill on her face which you could see part of in the framing of this shot. — with Diana Rosalind Goldman.
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