I recently completed a wild and fun shoot for the song "Baddest Man Alive" by RZA & The Black Keys with director Chris Marrs Piliero. The song is going to be featured in RZA's upcoming feature film 'The Man With The Iron Fists', a kung-fu, western with a release date of Nov 2nd
Chris' treatment was a refreshing blend of comedy and action and I knew that I would need to keep the lighting atmospheric, moody, and serious. The video takes place in a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant where RZA and The Black Keys duke it out over the last fortune cookie.
I drew upon my experiences traveling throughout Asia and painted the scene with a chaotic mix of fluorescent tungsten, and LED with strong and saturate colors. The location had many crimson and dark earth tones and I decided to compliment the space with vivid red gold, and amber. For color separation, I used cool white fluorescents in the kitchen with plus green and color mixed with dimmed tungsten units.
This was an incredibly challenging shoot because we only had Dan, Patrick, and RZA for 4 hours and had to knock out nearly 30 setups with them. To facilitate for this narrow shooting window I employed 2 cameras w/ Kowa Anamorphic Primes and Zoom lens, and spent the first 3 hours of the day rigging from the ceiling using menace arms, medium base-baby pin adapters, and speedrail w/ wall spreaders. We needed to move fast and furious once the guys came to set and this method allowed us to burn through our setups. This of course came at a slight compromise for lighting but I'm very happy with what we were able to do within our modest budget and time-frame.
The second challenge was to facilitate for high speed on a very tight budget. Chris wanted to shoot the majority of the action material at 96fps so I lit the scene at a T8 and put ND in front of the lens for the 24fps sync material, pulling when needed for when Chris wanted to do high speed. I opted to shoot redcode 8:1 to allow me to stay at 5K Anamorphic when we needed to do higher frame rates.
You can watch the video right here! Enjoy!
I drew upon my experiences traveling throughout Asia and painted the scene with a chaotic mix of fluorescent tungsten, and LED with strong and saturate colors. The location had many crimson and dark earth tones and I decided to compliment the space with vivid red gold, and amber. For color separation, I used cool white fluorescents in the kitchen with plus green and color mixed with dimmed tungsten units.
This was an incredibly challenging shoot because we only had Dan, Patrick, and RZA for 4 hours and had to knock out nearly 30 setups with them. To facilitate for this narrow shooting window I employed 2 cameras w/ Kowa Anamorphic Primes and Zoom lens, and spent the first 3 hours of the day rigging from the ceiling using menace arms, medium base-baby pin adapters, and speedrail w/ wall spreaders. We needed to move fast and furious once the guys came to set and this method allowed us to burn through our setups. This of course came at a slight compromise for lighting but I'm very happy with what we were able to do within our modest budget and time-frame.
The second challenge was to facilitate for high speed on a very tight budget. Chris wanted to shoot the majority of the action material at 96fps so I lit the scene at a T8 and put ND in front of the lens for the 24fps sync material, pulling when needed for when Chris wanted to do high speed. I opted to shoot redcode 8:1 to allow me to stay at 5K Anamorphic when we needed to do higher frame rates.
You can watch the video right here! Enjoy!
