Creating Impossible is Nothing

We have another BTS post to share some things from our Adidas spec film. This spec was our most extensive shoot yet. It was five days with five different talents. Each talent represented a different sport. The nice thing with doing a sports film was everything didn’t have to be perfectly shot in regards to smooth shots and framing. The handheld look played to our advantage in this film. 

One thing we learned from Eric Thayne in Cinema Mastery is really thinking out the talent’s story and having a purpose to each action a person makes in a film. 

For example, each talent in the beginning is doing something. They’re all different but they all surround this idea of finding motivation before a work out. Thinking about these things in pre-production really helps going into a shoot feeling confident. Even if the full story doesn’t come out in the film at least the viewer knows that the talent isn’t just wandering about aimlessly. 

We’ll talk a little bit about lighting too, especially because we have a few BTS from our skateboarding scene. In this scene we filmed as a skate park in a pretty secluded area with no lighting or outlets close by. We brought in a generator to power our Quasar Science lights. Here’s an example of really blocking out the proper amount of time to set your scene. Although there was probably on 4-5 shots from this scene that made the final cut, it took at least an hour to set up and break down the lights. 

In the end, very little lighting was used. We took advantage of natural lighting even though most of the film is shot at night. For example, one of our favorite shots is the Little Italy scene. Jordan our soccer player is dribbling the ball through the street. Here we used the hanging milk jug lights as our backdrop lighting instead of just having a dark night’s sky as our backdrop. 

Hope you enjoy the film, we’re excited to work on more films like this in the future.