Search the Community

At the beginning of September I had the chance to shoot a series of commercials for Leroy Merlin in Spain. We shot 4 x 20" commercials + 1 x 30" in a couple of days in a house on the outskirts and I had to create all the light. I've to say that I learnt a lot during the process because the director, Amar Hernandez, wanted a very particular look.. with the light mimicking the sunlight entering into the rooms in a really imperfect way.. and even though we couldn't do that at the end he definitely changed the way I look at light now. I don't know how to describe it but I started to see patterns in light and I started being aware of how light creates shadows on objects and people, specially faces. This might sound very silly because I already knew how light worked, I've been seeing light and shadows since I was born :D but I wasn't applying it to the way I was working and I was definitely discriminating images or ideas. Since I met him, I have been applying it to my lighting ideas and I really think that I am a better photographer now because of him and how he directed me towards something that I didn't know that was there! We wanted to use the Alexa LF for this project mainly because there are some objects in the commercial and we wanted them to be more isolated. However, we didn't use it because we found out that the LF sensor had a problem (you can see the stitching line in the middle of the image) and we went for the Alexa Mini. Anyways! Enough with the backstory! Here is the director's cut of the commercial. Leroy Merlin - Procrastrinación 1) The living room is lit with a M90 coming from outside and a joker leko in the interior to create the shadows on the floor. 2) The bathroom is lit with 2 Aladdin LED panels on the ceiling, a M18 outside the window and a Joker Leko pointed towards the sink for no reason other than "I like it" B) 3) The bedroom at night was lit with a couple of blondes with CTB outside and a Celeb on top of them, 4) The bedroom during day time was lit with a M90 (that you can see) outside the window. 5) The cat (which is the shot that I love the most) was lit with a pocket par to create the flare in camera and a 575W flagged to create the shadow. 6) The girl in the room is lit with a M90 from outside.. I wanted the pattern on the wall to be more prominent but it was impossible for us to make it harder.. and when we finished shooting that part my gaffer moved the head of the light to switch it off and created a mega hard shadow on the wall that we all saw and loved but we couldn't reshoot because we didn't have time to do so. And that's pretty much all! When they did the colour grading I was in Mallorca working but they were super kind and sent me some frames for me to take a look at it. Even though I think that the saturation is a bit high and the shadows are super lifted (We created images with more contrast and not that saturated) I think that it looks good! We shot on Alexa Mini + Zeiss Superspeeds @3200 ASA I hope you like it as much as I enjoyed shooting it! Have a lovely day!