What a stunning clinic I had on my hands to film! A shoot like this seems pretty simple but there are always problems that pop up that I have to solve which helps me learn and become a better cinematographer.
The client wanted us to get some shots of their awards without capturing any glares. This was pretty tricky at first as the awards are displayed in glass frames which were full of reflections. Not to mention we had to light the awards too with our own light – our newly purchased aputure 300x. After playing around with the shooting angles for a while, we found that the only way not to get any reflections or glare was to shoot straight on and at the same heights as the frames themselves. Holding the gimbal/camera combo in this precise position wasn’t easy due to the weight (Canon C500 MKII on Ronin S). And on top of that, we wanted to add some movement into the shot. So with my arms about to give out, I got the gimbal in the right position and orbited the awards as much as possible without presenting any glares.
Once we nailed this shot, the rest was pretty straight forward for me as I shoot a lot of Hotels and Real Estate videos. Check out a previous blog post featuring a property with a helicopter landing pad! The key to filming something which has no movement in front of the camera, is to make the camera move to keep things interesting. That’s why a gimbal and slider are the most go-to tools to use for such videos. We shot everything in 4k 60fps which allowed us to slow things down or crop into frame if needed. It’s such a luxury to have both of those options available in post. Unlike when I first started out as a videographer with the Canon T1i and I had to switch to 720p in order to shoot 60fps. And as I write this blog post, Canon just announced the R5 mirrorless camera that can shoot 8k RAW. Filmmakers are spoiled for choice now!
During the post production side of things, I wanted to raise the saturation of the blues a little more than the rest of the image. In premiere pro I found the HSL secondary panel within Lumetri colour to do exactly what I wanted. You can use the colour picker to isolate any colour you want and then adjust the settings just for that colour. This came in very handy to assist in making the blues from the sky stand out a little more.
I’ll leave you with some stills from the video and some BTS pictures from the shoot of me in action.
