Famous Footwear – “Neighborhood”

Every one in awhile, life throws you a bone. In this case, Director Loni Peristere of Zoic Studios asked me to shoot 3 commercials with him over a little more than a week in Vancouver. The bone? (Besides the work!) One of those 3 – was to be shot at 600 fps – at night – with snow and with motion control! We all knew that this one had the potential to be very special. And I think Loni and the team nailed this one! Here it is:

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This was a dream job for me – for several reasons. For one – it was a beautiful story with a simple but strong emotional thread that we can all relate to easily. Second, Loni wanted to make this thing sing visually – and he made sure that I had the resources at hand to pull this shoot off.

First we needed 225,000 Watts of light – a MASSIVE amount – to get enough light to shoot at 600 frames per second – with the Phantom Gold HD camera. I brought one of my favorite people up with me to Canada – Gaffer Mark Lindsay who wielded the light with ease. Basically we had enough light to cook an egg in under 10 seconds – and a turkey in under an hour. BUT – believe it or not – all of this light got us a whopping aperture of f 2.0 on the Cooke S4/i primes… So Yeah… think about that for a second: 225,000 Watts of light and you get f 2.0…!!! Even with a 360º shutter (359º to be exact) – at 600 fps SO LITTLE LIGHT is actually making it to the sensor.

This was a huge technical challenge – and one that several people told us: “could not be done” on as large a stage/setting as we were hopping to do – with diffused lights. Lighting it with enough light is easy – but lighting it well is not with a good quality and shape of light isn’t.

Below is a great video that shows you the behind the scenes shoot – all of the people, the gear, the lights. A HUGE thanks goes out to Chris Dowsett for shooting this footage – and for putting this edit together for everyone to see!

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You’ll see we used the GoPro HD camera (see bottom of that page) and mounted it on the motion control rig to get you a first person perspective – or a first camera perspective if you will.

One other hero on the shoot – was my 1st AC – or focus puller. Cam Hayduk – with more than 26 years of experience under his belt as a 1st AC, had the impossible challenge of keeping focus with up to a 100mm (see the tight headshot of our actress with hair flowing) WHILE moving on a dolly, as she too was running towards camera. Did I mention this was done at f 2.0> At one point we had less than an inch of depth of field. And don’t forget – that a split second of being out of focus at 600 fps- or “buzzing” – last an even greater eternity when played back at 24 fps. (One quarter second shot at 600fps will last 6.25 SECONDS when played back at 24fps…. that’s a long time for everyone to see you were soft on set… no pressure at all there!) And not to belabor the point: but the dolly was being pulled/pushed by skilled human beings – not a robot. Ergo a variance in speed in both the dolly, and the actress was expected – not to mention a ramp up an down. Each burst lasted 7 seconds max with the RAM aboard the camera at 2048X1080… Cam was the MVP of this shoot in my book.

The last technical challenge? When shooting at f 2.0 – how could we get multiple planes of focus at once? It was impossible. We discussed tilt-shift lenses – but those would have looked quite odd with snow. Adding twice the amount of light (cost prohibitive!) would have gotten us all of f 2.8.

Therefore we shot many of the sequences with a motion control rig. Basically a computerized dolly/jib system – that can repeat each move EXACTLY time and time again. You’ll notice one shot where the actor puts his foot down from the cab – and the actress is running towards him. Getting them both in focus at 600 fps wide open would have been impossible. Here is the magic of Motion Control + a great post house to splice them together seamlessly.

Overall – all 3 shoots were a blast. But this one is special for me. Not only did it turn out beautifully – but we had an absolute blast on set – as you can witness by all of the smiles in the behind the scenes video. (And we were shooting NIGHTS!!! After 3 shoot days during daylight hours.)

Thanks to the entire crew, cast, production, art deparment, PAs and to the incredible people who did the post at Zoic – and to Loni – it was an unforgettable two winter nights in Vancouver – in July!

and if you haven’t seen enough, here’s one more: a time lapse Chris shot of everything being set up:

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