“This is a pretty recent video compared to a lot of other posts lately, released about three months ago as of writing this. Definitely one of my favorite projects we’ve done, and strangely one of the more stressful. Up until this point, I don’t believe I’ve done any night car interiors since a school project in college with my good friend Dylan Kearney. You’ll notice it as the very justified and motivated black and white image. Even though that little shoot will always hold a special, small, embarrassed slice of my heart, it couldn’t look like that again. The camera is way too high, and I really dislike keying from the instrument cluster. I don’t like how it interacts with the steering wheel, and hands on the steering wheel; it’s too bright and distracting, at least for this video. So for Basement, the camera height was easy -- just don’t rig the camera like a dummy. Sadly, the only image I have is a very clunky assembly during pre production where we were dialing in the framing, but it was super simple. One 10” suction with a ball leveling mount, two 6” suctions to get our triangulation points on the camera, and four ratchet straps attached to the car in opposite directions to keep constant force ‘pulling’ the primary suction onto the hood of the car. Lighting was a different story, I was pretty unsure of how to approach it until I talked to some folks at CFG Rental Group who recommended Litegear LiteStix. I’d never used them before, but they’re small 6” and 12” tubes that are fully dimmable and have color temp control from around 2800-6000k. On top of that, they’re LEDs, so I could power the four that I rented off a single 150 watt inverter running out of the car’s cigarette lighter. They were perfect. On the day, we only ended up using three Litestix; two 12” and one 6”. Our main placements were the 12” key for Solemn (the driver), hidden along the inside of the car door. Then we had another 12” placed over the dome light of the car that keyed the subjects in the back seat, gave Solemn a consistent edge light, and gave us a nice little skip off the dashboard. Lastly, we had a 6” in the hatchback area, subtly backlighting the passengers as well as giving an edge to the seats when no one else was in the vehicle. The backlight and key don’t play the entire video, because the ambient street light often overpowered them. To control spill from all the lights, I just made little 2-3” gaff tape barndoors that we dialed in as needed. ALL of the units were hidden in frame behind the rear view mirror and a very well dressed piece of a duvetyne we placed there to give us a little more ‘hiding space’. This was our setup for 90% of the video. I think the character limit has been reached, so I’ll follow up in the comments.
We also had slowmotion shots with most of the passengers sprinkled throughout the video. This effect didn’t really translate to a still image, so I didn’t include a picture. But Malcolm and I have always talked about using flicker in high speed intentionally from light sources not intended for video. So we rooted around the garage and found some old LED rope lights that flickered like bonkers at 180 FPS. They were HIDEOUS. And perfect. Along our main Litestix, we rigged (wasted gafftape) the LED rope lights to the roof of the car. When we moved into our slowmotion shots, we simply unplugged the lightstix, and plugged in the rope lights. Bam, flicker.
The last element of the video is the very bizzare infinite black sequence which surprisingly, we DIDN’T shoot live on the streets of LA. We filmed in our garage. Leading up to the shoot, I got all my duv together and blacked out the walls of our garage to get us as close to possible, then crushed it further in post. The lighting here is… it’s something. In hindsight, I wish we had taken an approach more sophisticated than filling an amazon cart with strobe lights and DJ lasers that were within our budget. I don’t dislike how it turned out, but I think it could have used some more finesse, because ultimately it ended up informing how we decided to edit the video. In closing, I’ve included an image of the ‘spared-no-expense’ deluxe video village booth. We ran SDI’s from the camera through the car to our luxury viewing booth so we could watch the image. All those DJ strobes ate the budget for a Terradek. That’s really all I have to say about that.”
-Symeon, Director of Photography
Check out the video for “The Basement” by Solemn Bridgham and Marlowe: