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Last March I had the chance to work on a commercial that was the biggest project I had undertaken as a cinematographer and I wanted to share the experience with you all! Director was Ian Power (same director I had worked with on The Tattoo) and I was super excited to come on board and work with him again. ESB - A Brighter Future To me it was a very emotional journey because of the scale of the project. We had to shoot LOADS of locations with very limited time, crew and money over 4 days. We usually had to shoot 4 locations each day with whole unit moves and each unit move took around 1 1/2 hours (more or less). The good thing about it is that I learnt a lot about negotiating times, spaces, how to manage everybody and how to keep cheerful and happy while making sure that the negative things didn't affect me or the crew! It is such a skill to have! And as one of my friends told me: "You're only shooting one location at each time" :) We used two Alexa Minis and Master Prime lenses with a lot of diffusion, different filters for different eras. There was a storyboard but what we did was using the storyboard as a guide and once we entered the locations (which we spent a month looking for) we blocked everything so we made sure that we were going to use our limited time on each location super well and we had time to shoot the storyboard stuff and find some other interesting angles without having to change the light... so we ended up shooting a lot of "found frames" and some of them ended up on the commercial, which is really nice. My lighting package wasn't very big, I had 3 x 6Ks, 1 x Skypanel, some fluorescents, some 12 x 12 frames and loads of bulbs.. and a marvellous gaffer called Dave Durney who put together a magnificent team who worked tirelessly! It is on tv, cinemas, online, etc, etc in Ireland and UK since July 1st so if you're in those two countries it is highly likely that you will catch it :) I hope you enjoy it! Have a lovely day!