Commercial Film Shoot Rain Machine
Final video embeded at bottom of page
Frame from final commercial
Visual Reference
I was approached by Mvrk Studios to light this :30 web commercial for a tech company. The company sent over a wonderful pitch deck and I hopped on a Zoom call with the Director and DP to discuss the day. Everything was pretty straight forward with the exception of this opening shot in which our talent was sitting in a car in the rain. Living in Portland, OR you’d think there’s a good chance of rain on the shoot day, Spoiler- It was 80 degrees and sunny on our shoot day.
Creating Rain on Camera
We discussed the setup on our call, It was a medium close-up of an actor sitting in a stationary car. It is helpful that the framing was fairly tight on the talent and we knew it was only going to be seen for a short time. Our director had a great idea for how to do this on a budget- A sprinkler! I thought that it might actually just work, based on the framing of the shot. I agreed to help rig the sprinkler head over the car and help make the shot happen..It actually worked wonderfully for our conditions and made for a real fun setup. It was a great way to end the night.
The Lighting
The rain was of course only part of the puzzle, we still had to light the thing! Because we were filming in front of the house we were at all day, we had control over the interior of the house. We turned all the house lights on and moved both the car and camera to a few different spots until we were looking at the most pleasing background. There was an Aputure 600D and Aputure Lantern 90 pointed straight up to give a general glow and ambiance to the rest of the yard. On the car I had a tungsten Leko and a Sodium Vapor gel hitting the edges of the car and backlighting the rain. The key light is an Arri 1K fresnel and that is being softened by a 4x4 of 250. The final pop was a Rosco Dash (On the dash) to give a subtle glow as if it were coming from the dash of the car. It was blue to give some color contrast and at a very low intensity level to keep it subtle.
