Case Study // S Class

A Case study: s-class

Nashville, TN

Cinematography/Color Grade by Jake Burgess of Cardboard Robot Visuals

Directed/Edited by Apollo Media Group

"Do you want to go to Nashville?" I blinked, my phone pressed to my ear. It was a particularly cold and rainy October day in Northern Michigan. Of course I wanted to go. After a month or so of pre-production, I was in the car and on the way to Nashville with my friend Sean Calvano of Apollo Media Group to shoot a music video for the very talented up and coming group, The SLVR Tongues. Eight hours later, we picked up a Mercedes S Class in Kentucky. After a drive that was slightly faster than it was safe, we arrived in Nashville, Tennessee.

One late night and an early morning, we arrived at a rental house to pick up our gear. This project was particularly cool because it was the first project I got to shoot on the Red Epic Dragon, and to ice the cake, Zeiss CP2 Cinema glass. 

Day one of shooting: we found a secluded area to park the Mercedes, fire up a generator, and spent a couple hours lighting. The goal was to emulate a moody, moonlit scene.

Once we were happy with the lighting, it was time to shoot. We filmed in the car for several hours and it looked great. Nothing but the cast, crew, and a warm Nashville breeze. Then, disaster struck.

Okay, disaster might be a strong word. But it certainly threw a very large, heavy, rusted wrench in the production. The battery in our gear truck had died. Not normal, "oh let's just jump it", dead either. We're talking Han Solo dead. After about 45 minutes of trying to jump the engine, one of our Nashville friends called AAA to tow the car back to where we were staying. The shoot wrapped at 11pm. We left at 2am. 

The remaining days of the shoot went by smoothly. Although we didn't have time to get the truck running until the night before our return trip to Michigan. Our next location was a beautifully rustic barn in the middle of nowhere. 

The main obstacle in the barn was power. The age of the building made it beautiful, but it also meant we had to run hundreds of feet of extension cables to avoid blowing breakers (which happened a couple times). The other challenge was the size of the room vs the size of our light kit. Ordinarily harsh lights would've been a no-go for this type of setup, so I pivoted my focus and decided to go for a sharp, dramatic look.

To balance out some of the harsh shadows I fired a dimmed down 1k directly towards our talent, which balanced the 2k shooting through a single sheet of tissue paper. A full silk would have cut out too much of our light, and because our key was an LED source I didn't have to worry about the tissue paper catching on fire. Never do this on a standard light. 

Using the 1k as our fill brought our contrast ratio to something much softer. Now all that was left was to separate our subjects from the background and to add an eye light. We didn't have the time or resources to rig a proper back light, so I settled for putting it in the farthest corner I could. This resulted in a really nice defining light on the talent. For the eye light I simply set up a silk to use as a bounce and fired a dimmed down 650 through it. The advantage of using a silk for this is I ended up with a surface that glowed more than it bounced light - which was perfect because I didn't want the light to interact with anything other than the eyes. The 4x4 increased the size of the source which compensated for the distance from the subject, bringing life into the eyes of our talent.

This is getting dense, so I'll end it here. This project was a lot of fun, and left me excited, inspired, and ready to create the next thing.

Written by Jake Burgess