diagram: nerdio – large office scene

The intro shot on our nerdio commercial was a wide of the whole office space, which didn’t give me any place to hide lights in frame. So I decided to apply the ole’ adage, “Sometimes the best way to make it look like a grocery store, is to leave it lit like a grocery store”, and used the installed overhead lighting and available practicals to fill out the frame.

To accent the office lighting and give some shape to the talent in the foreground, an 8×8 magic cloth was placed just out of frame on camera left, with an Aputure 600d Pro pushing through that.

A double net was folded in half and clipped to the bottom half of the 8×8 magic cloth. I did this to reduce the intensity of the back of the couch in the foreground. Without the double net, the back of the couch would have looked “sourcey”, and given away where the key light was located.

The 600d was pushed through a CTO gel. This brought the color temperature of it closer to the office lighting. Rather than clip the gel directly to the fresnel, I clipped it to a horizontal c-stand arm with some space between the lens of the fresnel and the gel.

In the back of the room, a Kelvin EPOS 300 was pushed through an 8×8 half-grid to help highlight the background talent. I chose half-grid because it’s about a stop brighter than magic cloth. With the wattage of the Kelvin EPOS 300 being half that of the Aputure 600d Pro, a one-stop difference in diffusion brings them to be *about equal* in terms of measured output. And because it’s the back of the room, the reduction in softness won’t be noticeable to the viewer.

This setup also happened to be the same look as the last shot, so we filmed that too since we were already lit. The closing shot just required us to reposition the camera for a different dolly movement!

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client: nerdio
agency: small hill films
dir: aj campli
dp: bailey miclette
1st: dustin wheeler
2nd: riley clinton
gaffer: tyler trepod
kg: teej morgan
pa: deanna schaekel