Red Cross Commercial - Directed by Jota Aronak

Miguel Angel · May 14, 2017

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to team up again with the amazing director Jota Aronak and our wonderful production designer Carolina Vita to shoot a commercial for Red Cross for its Spanish Summer campaign produced by a Spanish production company called Sal Gorda.

We had a really tight schedule, 1 day for us to shoot across different locations in Madrid, Spain.

Luckily we found the three interiors in one house or else we wouldn't have been able to work that fast.

So, one thing that I love doing is to spend time in each location to see what the light does in that location and that's what I did for our 6 locations, once we had our locations chosen I went the following day to the 6 of them at the times that I thought that we should shoot in them and then I suggested that the schedule was created according to the lighting needs to take advantage of the natural light.

Everything but the bathroom sequence and the background of the soldier shot was shot with natural light.

As we wanted the piece to feel more real and gritier, we shot at 3200ASA with the Alexa Mini and Master Prime lenses.

We mainly used the 25mm with Glimmerglass 2 or 3 and a Soft Black Net.

Colour grading was done in El Colorado in Madrid and we only changed the contrast a bit and made a couple of power windows here and there.. 2 hours and done!

So, if you live in Spain you will be watching the commercial non-stop on tv, in all the tv stations till July 20th!

It was a really emotional project for me because I was a Red Cross volunteer when I was a kid and that made me think about all the people around the world who helps other people in different types of situations so having the opportunity to create something for them was beautiful!

Have a lovely day!! :)

Robin R Probyn · May 14, 2017

Wow looks amazing.. I never would have thought it was nearly all natural light.. nice work sir

Mark Kenfield · May 14, 2017

Lovely stuff Miguel. Still looks very clean for 3200 ISO. Did you have to do any particular noise reduction (chroma or luma) to keep the images usable at such a high ISO?

Miguel Angel · May 15, 2017

Thank you Robin!

The bathroom sequence was lit with a select and difussion and the background of the soldier had 3 photoflood (that you can see as the white spots, 3 x 575w for that background and 1 x 1.2K for the interior of the tent, which in a different take I made less bright.. but that wasn't the take chosen haha.

Mark, thanks!! we didn't apply any noise reduction, we wanted all the texture we could get! Maybe it has to do with the T-stop I used which was between T2.8 and T5.6 across the locations?

Have a lovely day!

Robin R Probyn · May 15, 2017

Fav shot is the wide shot of the old guy in the room.. lovely light on his face.. I think you'll be shooting the next Bourne mate !

Satsuki Murashige · May 15, 2017

Looks great Miguel! Very topical and emotional as well.

That's some heavy diffusion stacking there, what made you choose that combo? Always wanted to try Soft Net Black.

Miguel Angel · May 15, 2017

That's my favourite shot too Robin!

I wouldn't mind shooting the next Bourne haha!

Thanks Satsuki!!!

I think that the answer might disappoint you.. I use Glimmerglass or Glimmerglass Bronze always and I usually end up using number 2 or 3.

On top of that, I wanted to put something else and I found this really old Soft Black Net in 4x4 in the "forgotten filters" box in the camera rental house and I told them: "Hey! Can I take this?", they said yes and the rest is history!

Robin R Probyn · May 15, 2017

Those 4X4 black net and black pro mist.. filters were de rigueur back in the Digibeta/F900 days.. to make things look more "filmic " !.. on 2/3 inch sensor cameras..

Elizabeth Hylton · May 16, 2017

Wow.. really impressive. Nice work!

Satsuki Murashige · May 16, 2017

I think that the answer might disappoint you..

Not at all! At least it made for a good story. I really love nets too, but it's a pain to rear net lenses and I haven't found front net filters that I like yet. I've made a custom 4x5.65 net frame for myself, but it's not quite what I'm looking for.

I'd recommend bringing your own filters if you shoot over here. Bronze Glimmerglass and Soft Net Blacks are hard to find in SF. I would imagine they are easy to find in LA.

Miguel Angel · May 18, 2017

Wow.. really impressive. Nice work!

Thank you very much Elizabeth! :)

Not at all! At least it made for a good story. I really love nets too, but it's a pain to rear net lenses and I haven't found front net filters that I like yet. I've made a custom 4x5.65 net frame for myself, but it's not quite what I'm looking for.

I'd recommend bringing your own filters if you shoot over here. Bronze Glimmerglass and Soft Net Blacks are hard to find in SF. I would imagine they are easy to find in LA.

There is one thing that you can do if you don't want to net the lenses.

Get a plastic / magnet circle the size of the mount that is super thin and place it inside :) that's what we did on a couple of seasons of Penny Dreadful.

Thanks for the tip!!! I hope that I can go there!!! :) Still waiting for confirmation ha.

Those 4X4 black net and black pro mist.. filters were de rigueur back in the Digibeta/F900 days.. to make things look more "filmic " !.. on 2/3 inch sensor cameras..

Ah.. the old black promist :D