Peter Figen
Online
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On
|
 p.2 #5 · Skywalker Dubbing Stage/Neve Consoles | |
Neil - The setup is remarkably simple - an Gitzo 3140 with a Manfrotto 405 gear head and a RRS lever clamp. The camera had a RRS L bracket, and the body was shifted in that clamp to keep the lens in more or less the same spot - in effect a rear standard shift on a view camera. I have since acquired a Hartblei TS Adapter which allow you to attach the lens to the tripod and shift the body - without going through the hassle of sliding the camera in the RRS clamp. There's nothing fancy at all about this. It's all about camera placement and attention to detail. For instance, in the Fox shot, it took about half an hour just to place the Aeron chairs, and even after that we (both my assistant and myself) missed the fact that only one of them had the lumbar support, and the old style at that. I selected that, flipped in and pasted into place, changing the lighting slightly to suit and that was that.
There's a LOT of stuff that you would never know happened in post. Even after wiping down everything, there are scratches, wear marks, missing screws, misaligned formica panels, misaligned panels in the board itself, burned out room lights, etc. - all of which are meticulously corrected. There was a pool table down in the front left of the Fox shot with a huge and very ugly iron lighting rig bolted to the fabric wall. I made the decision (not the client) that it had to come out, but since the room is not symmetrical, you couldn't just copy and past from one side to the other. Oh no.
On other shots there was only a partial shelf at the top leading edge of the console. I decided to completely rebuild that digitally rather than show it how it really was. Each one of the sound control "wedges" in the walls at Fox were individually selected and enhanced to make them stand out just a bit more, adding to the feel of dimensionality. There was a hand rail along one of the walls that didn't fit visually, so it went away. Remember, it's advertising, not documentary.
Unfortunately, we never shot images of the setup. We should have, but in those situations, you're moving as fast as you can and people making way more money than you ever will are impatiently waiting to get back to their projects.
The bracket I did ranged from 15 seconds down to 1/30th or thereabouts in one stop increments, shooting two frames each, just in case. It might have taken five or six of those to build the final exposure, and even though I knew I was going further than I needed to, at least I knew I would have everything I needed and more for the final.
|
