We wrapped shooting for “What Can You Do?”, the ambitious television spot for local film festival CineSol’s 36 Hour Film Race event, this morning at about 12:15am.

The final scene shot will be the first scene in the spot: the drama sequence. The director wanted the scene to take place during the day, but I wanted complete control of the light so we opted to shoot at night and blast a 2k through the window and white curtains to double for the sun. On the master shot (which included a dolly move), I used a 1k for a rim light on the woman and another 1k for the man’s face. For later shots I would use just the 2k through the curtains with a 1k fill (scrimmed 2 stops down) and another 1k for accent, using the falloff as slit through barndoors. A stage fog machine was used to create an atmosphere that would show the beams of “sunlight” coming from the window.

The footage looks great and I’m very proud of the results. I can’t wait to see the final spot.

Erick pointed out some Mole-Richardson 2K fresnels on eBay and I snatched them up. Turns out that when it was all over I bought a Junior, a Baby Junior and a Midget (it’s called an Inbetweenie in the real world) with two Mathews heavy duty location stands for the price on one Junior brand new at B&H. The Junior comes with a bunch of scrims, the Baby Junior comes with scrims and an 8-leaf barndoor and all of them come with at least two appropriate globes (4×2K, 2×200w). The Mathews light stands look awesome and the Midget will work with one of my light weight stands. The seller messaged me yesterday to let me know she’d ship them this weekend. Also, Erick just bought some gear from B&H and it should be arriving on Friday. Looks like Christmas came early this year!