Alex Sprenger

Hiro Murai shot this with his long time collaborator Larkin Seiple, whos work you can view here, albeit the page hasnt been updated for quite a while : http://www.larkinseiple.com/ They have shot multiple music videos for Childish Gambino / Donald Glover and all of them are definitely worth a watch. This one was shot on 35mm, as stated on Larkins IG page larksss.

Technically this is a gripping question, so maybe someone else would be more qualified to answer this. DONT try to use it with a C-stand arm. The weight and size are too much for them and it wouldnt support it. The cheapest way to do that is a simple goalpost rig, the process is detailed here pretty well: Then just use a Cardellini to mount the light to the pipe. Also: use safety chain, which you pull through the bail of the light and around the pipe, so it has just enough slack for you to adjust the lamphead in the correct direction. I hope there is enough room in the kitchen for that. If you dont have the room for that or the shape of the room doesnt accommodate for a goalpost rig, either a wallbreaker or a menace arm would be the way to go, but neither are one man band setups. Also, if not handled right, both of them and especially the wallbreaker can be dangerous to the people below it and damage the walls you attach it to - if you dont know what you are doing. Will be interesting to know what other people suggest.

I think you did great. Colorwise you are pretty much bang on. I think you could have used a tad bit more blue fill and the curtains are a bit hot (though that could still be fixed in the grade). If you compare the two wide shots, your reference has a very clear, crisp look, where your interior seems to fall into darkness quite often. That can be a creative choice, but with these night looks it most of the time looks best if you expose it a bit brighter than you would by eye and correct that in the grade, at least in my experience.

Most lighting equipment for film isnt really made for shooting at these incredibly low levels. I almost always stick a .6 or sometimes even a .9 ND on LED Panels I use indoors for night stuff (sometimes even during the day), because it just is impractical and tedious having to work in the 1-5% output range of these units. Same goes for tungsten fresnels, at ISO 800 and a t1.4, you can do very little with even a 300W without completely blasting the scene with light. Having everything on dimmers and constantly in the "barely on" region makes fine adjustments very difficult. Also, this isnt a bright, high key kind of look, but very dim shots - so if you shoot this at an 1.4, every tiny adjustment can become very strong. An additional benefit of giving yourself some headroom in terms of having an .6 ND on the camera is if you shoot a lot of commercial work, as Patrick evidently does, the agency at some point will tell you "we love it ... we just wondered, if its possible to have it just a bit brighter". Often you can get out of these situation with a bit of reasoning and explaining to them, that this was the look that we all agreed on and so forth, but if they are stubborn you can say "sure", change to an .3 ND on the camera, stop a bit down and you can immediately offer them a version that is a lot "safer". If you light precisely to the level that you think you will need and give yourself no headroom at all, this would take a longer relight.

There is also Cinetech in Rome, if you arent interested in the German center column dolly style (like Panther and Movietech). https://www.cinevision-solutions.com/ often sells used dollys, they are based in Germany as well I believe.

The M40 should be just enough for that. To my knowledge you cant use a 6 kW bulb with one, only 2,5 and 4 kW. It probably wont create blindingly bright light rays, but as you said the house is facing north, you should be good. It also depends what you might be seeing outside the windows? If you are looking at white walls hit by direct light, you will need a ton of light inside the building to keep the contrast ratio reasonable, if you are just looking into green canopy you (again) are of to a good start. I would not expose for the light level of the window or outside the window. To my experience, If you expose the outside 3 stops over, you most of the time get a good result, event though you might want to increase that level further if you want to go for that sunlight blasting in kind of look. In terms of haze: always use less than you think you need. With haze its very much like slowmotion: its easy to overdo it and go to far with it, because it just looks "cool". Try to restrain yourself with that as much as possible. Have a real hazer and not a fog machine. Technically you can get more or less the same results with it, but it eats into your valuable shoot time so much, because it takes way longer between takes to get it to that same level again, because it takes so long to settle and not look like fog anymore, even if you fan it like hell. For the angle: that depends what time you want to emulate. If there isnt a special time called for, I would try to have them reach so far into the room that they end lower than the talents face, which gives you the opportunity to light their faces softer than with just the harsh M40 beam. If you are unsure what looks good, try to have the haze already set when deciding on the final position of the M40 and have some stand ins, so you know, what the light does. I would also experiment with warming the M40 up a bit, with an 1/8 CTO or CTS. For me, that takes off a lot of the unnatural edge they tend to have.

Adrian, I did that a year ago in a theatre, with a 4K HMI PAR and a 4x4 mirror from a balcony and I definitely could have used more output that day, so I can only agree with your unit size recommendations. Maybe an M40 could do it, but probably nothing smaller...

Oh and be aware that skirting the kinos with duvetyne and pointing them straight down traps the heat of the lamps in there and can make them shift their color and I have had ballasts turn off on me because the lamps overheated. As the heavy blue tint will probably erase all perceivable shifts in color I imagine that wouldnt be an issue, but maybe turn the kinos off every once in a while.

For me it depends how wide you want to get in your widest shot AND how big the room is. If your room is fairly big, you could probably get away with simply pointing the Arri into the corner of the room at full spot right above the middle of your frame, gelling it red and dimming it way down. Then you would get one 4x4 daylight kino bank right above your protagonist, skirt the outside with duvetyne and set your camera white balance to 3200k. To finish, you would add 1/4 CTBs until you were satisfied with the tone of blue you would get. For this, it might be a full CTB. Because of the strong amount of seperation between the red and blue, it would be fairly easy to get EXACTLY the color you wanted for both of them in the grade, assuming you got the colors on set even close to the ones in the still. If the room is fairly small, then you couldn't get too wide in your shots anyway, as otherwise there would be a ton of spill between the two light sources and you dont have the space to hide the forest of flags it might need to contain the spill from the background into the foreground. How you would get the kinos right above the talent would depend on the location and how wide you want to go. Either you use a goalpost rig (if you arent getting too wide in your shot), a menace arm or you can somehow attached it directly to the ceiling (often possible in industrial settings).

These are fairly close reference shots, if you were to only shoot them (and nothing wider) I would suggest completely blocking the sun out by blacking out the windows, for complete control of fill levels. Especially the second reference shot has very low fill levels, almost looks like just 2 units, one hitting his face and one playing in the background. If you were to completely block out the sun, you could also safe money and shoot this tungsten, with very cheap units. Alternatively, a 1x1 LED panel would be easiest to handle if used with a softbox with grid. The light on him is not that soft, so that carefully positioned might be enough for the protagonist. If you find that to harsh, you can still put the LED panel through a 4x4 of WD. After that, something like an 8x8 Light Grid. Though at that point spill most of the time becomes your enemy, as it can easily kill all the moody contrast in the scene. The second one (with way more ambience light) could even be just a single source, closer to the actor, so the background just naturally falls off. Also, the first shot looks a lot softer too me, so you would have to use at least a 4x4. I guess you are shooting at least some shots wider than the reference shots? The second a window comes in frame you obviously have to show that all of the light is emitting from them. Will your scene play close to windows and if so, how close? You said low key, so I guess not too close?

I personally think that those are just plain kinos with (sometimes heavy) color gels. The first picture looks like that a lot + an almost balanced source in the Mac. If you want to nail that look rent a Blackmagic (saving that budget) and visit your local light rental place. Most of them have a wide variety of gels and would let you test them for a sixpack beer. Just set up a single kinoflo tube (for that fluorescent look) and try it with different colors, see what you like. Also, especially the blue in the background of the third and the pink hues in the second picture look like they tinkered with hue and saturation vs luminance and saturation quite a bit in post. Again, I would try to test that with different gels, but I would think that its not really the light source but more the gel and a bit the post processing. Furthermore: the blue and pink lights in the second and third picture arent necessarily Kinos.