“Inspiration Starts Here”, a TV commercial

2/20/2012:

In January I shot a TV commercial for Fit Weight loss and more, entitled “Inspiration Starts Here.” It was produced by Pea Green solutions and Infinit films. It is currenty airing on NBC, ABC and the food network in north and central Florida. You can watch the final cut of it here (click read more…), or on my films page. It was shot on the Panasonic Af-100, but not for the reasons you might think. We could have easily shot on RED or something else. However, I picked the Af-100 to turn its weakness (poor dynamic range) into an advantage. I wanted the highlights to blow out and bloom, and turn the windows a nice clean white. I also employed a white promist 2 filter on every shot to help with this look, but the bottom line was the smaller dynamic range actually made it easier for me to light the way I wanted to and still get the windows to blow out. We had plenty of lights, but to achieve the same effect with a better camera we would have needed big HMIs out the windows, blasting in (or go crazy with the contrast in post). Blowing out the highlights in post was of course an option, but I wanted to get it right in camera for a few reasons. The kicker was that to get the blooming look out of the promist filter we needed our highlights blown out, not just kind of bright. In terms of lights, we had some 4k HMI and 10k tungsten units available, but we needed 18k’s, and lots of them. There was a decent budget, but not for multiple 18k’s. This was completely backwards from normal thinking, and a first for me, but it shows that choosing the right tool for the job is more important than just getting the best, most expensive tool and hoping it works.

Watch here: Inspiration starts here