"This was kind of a tricky setup. The day before production, we decided we wanted the master to dolly in on the clerk and pan over to Tut as he reaches in to grab his room key. This meant that we couldn’t place any stands on the far side of camera where we were motivating the key from. There weren’t any points we could rig from on the ceiling, and wall spreaders were not an option. We toyed with the idea of booming a litemat over camera with a menace arm, but the we didn’t have enough speedrail to really make it work.
So we ended up simply shooting two 1k Pars into the ceiling from baby plates on the ground, and flagged any potential spill by taping some strips of duvetyne to the ceiling. I was concerned that the angle of the light would be too high and wouldn’t look natural, but it honestly turned out great. It felt motivated and like part of the space. It wrapped around the talent’s face softly and naturally. If I were to do it again, I think I would have tried taping some show cards up there, or using bleached muslin to help control the light’s angle a little more.
The ceiling also had a creamier, off-white color which affected the color temp a bit, muslin/showcards would have helped avoid that . At the end of the day, this worked with the slim gear package we had access to. Then we just threw up some quasars as subtle backlights and dimmed them to taste. That’s all I have to say about that."
-Symeon, Director of Photography