So yesterday I got to shoot a pretty cool spec commercial for my friend Luiz Magana. He wanted to do something for New Balance shoes, so he got a local break dancer together with three foot work dancers and found a gritty urban landscape in which to shoot them. The parking lot owner was very nice and let us shoot free of charge at the end of his parking lot, as long as we were gone by the time the Bears game traffic started to roll in.
We had scheduled to shoot yesterday, but the forecast called for thundershowers all day. We decided since it's Chicago and the weather is unpredictable, to put everyone on hold and call them in later rather than never. Luiz really wanted a sunny look, so we waited not only for the rain to stop, but the clouds to clear. We wanted to start at 9:00am, but by 10:00 it looked like we weren't going to get to shoot at all. Fortunatley we got a clandestine weather moment, and the clouds cleared and the rain stopped.
We shot with the Canon 7D, three L series zoom lenses covering a range of 17mm to 200mm, and we used a 24" slider plate from indiSYSTEM. The slider plate was a cheap model, but it worked great to get a little bit of movement in shots with a foreground. See picture below:
With the Canon 7D we shot a series of shots for each performer, but this one shot in particular was impressive because he did a full flip at 60fps while we captured the train passing by overhead.
We were working with limited light equipment, a flex fill was all we had, but the bright sunny day and the color levels we carefully set the camera to gave us enough latitude to modify the images in post and still get a nice looking product shot.
The idea is to add motion graphics in After Effects to all of the shots that look like this one below:
The wall behind the performer will feature simple 2D animation of sketches drawn on the wall. We are also looking into erasing the linoleum mat he is performing on, but that seems like it will be far more complex of an effect.
For now the commercial is just being edited, but I'll keep updated on it's progress as it comes along.
