If you have ever asked me why I chose this career you have likely heard me talk about Lego’s. My response is often along the lines of “26 year old Chris on set is like 10 year old Chris in a pile of Lego’s.”
On one hand we live in an incredibly fortunate time and place where we can make career decisions based on factors that seem as trivial as that. On the other hand, “Play” may not in fact be trivial. In my experience thus far, Play has always been the cornerstone of innovation. When you’re having fun while solving a problem it seems as if your brain works much more efficiently, and calmly. Managing decisions with a higher degree of precision and most importantly exploring options more quickly and thoroughly (I would love it if a neuroscientist could tell me if I’m crazy or this is legit).
I try to exercise this type of innovation on every project but my recent commercial collaboration with 144 Design for St. Francis Medical was perfectly suited for a little bit of play. (It helps when the subject matter your pitching involves kids acting like daredevils.)
We did two spots, one with a girl flying down a hill in a Radio Flyer wagon decked out like a race car and one with a little boy dressed like Super Man jumping off of a swing.
Here are some behind the scenes notes as well as some of my thoughts behind lighting and rigging.
Stay tuned! We are in post-production right now and will be posting these spots soon!
Here are the overheads for camera and sun position for the race car spot
We setup for the head-on shot first since it had the most complex lighting setup and the rest of the shots would all be simpler variations of this.
Resulting shot
Mckenzie from 144 Design opperating the leaf blower.
Sophie getting billowed with smoke.
Yes this is confusing I know.
This spot relied almost exclusively on mounting the camera in a way that it would alway stay in position relative to our talent while he swung. we designed this rig to provide multiple planes to mount the camera. It had to be heavily counterweighted opposite wherever the camera was to allow the swing to move properly. The rig was so rigid that at one point we were even able to rig a 4x4 Floppy to the swing so that the negative fill followed him. This made it so we were able to use one flag instead of a wall of 3-4 to cover the full range of swing.
Here is a better view of what it looks like with our hero in the seat.
This is the best photo i can find of the full lighting but it was nearly identical to the first spot. We didn't need to use a kicker on this one due to the fact that the negative fill was smaller and the sky provided the rim on the right shoulder, In addition with the sky having the white clouds we had less of a need to pull him off the background. The biggest challenge was avoiding strips of light seeping through between the 6X6 Dif and the yellow poles the swing was supported from.
