Shot over four days in a purpose-built set built at StillMoving Studios in Cheltenham UK, this shoot allowed us to push our use of broncolor products further than we’ve ever done before.
Within this series we took a number of real life arrest stories and pushed them to their artistic limits. Each shot started as an idea, which in turn then became a storyboarded image with precise planning for lighting. By removing these stories from their bitter realities and retelling them in our own way, we were given the freedom to design the lighting just how we wanted. In order to give you a better insight into how we designed the lighting, we are going to delve into one of our favourite pieces from the series – Clown.
The lighting of a set is an incredible tool for guiding the viewer through the story behind the scenes. For each and every story, we started by looking into how the viewers eye should travel through the scene.
We broke the scene for “Arrested clown” into three parts – the clown, the police, and the doorway. As we wanted a dramatic and ominous feel to the scene, we decided to use cool tones and dark contrasts to achieve the intended look and feel. We started with two broncolor Siros with steel blue gels firing into a 3x3 m white bounce screen to act as a fill for the entire set.
Starting with the clown, we used a broncolor Beauty Dish with grids rigged above the set to key light the face. We took the light round to the reverse side to keep the ominous mood lighting we wanted. This also acted as a backlight for the spray when it hit the clown's face, making the liquid stand out from the background. We had the fill coming from the two broncolor Siros with the steel blue gels levelling the lighting on the clown costume. This last fixture was equipped with a P70 reflector with a CTB gel, creating this cold edge light on the clown.
Each person was lit with three lights, roughly equating to a key light, an edge light and a fill light. When lighting the police officers, we hid the edge light behind the table which really showed how amazing the Siros are. The ability to have such a small, powerful and battery-operated strobe is extremely useful.
The doorway light was made up of three lights: the first fitted with a P70 on the other side of the door to give a hard shadow from the legs, the second with a Softbox 100 x 100 with a frosted lavender gel to give the push of light through the door, and the last one with a Softbox 180 x 30 to bring out the texture of the door.
The nimbleness of the Siros monolights really came through during this shoot. Having various lights rigged above the set, hidden behind the door and even rigged under the table, gave our team endless ways of lighting each image. That ability to take control of every light direct from the trigger (or via bronControl app) at speed meant that we could work quickly and test out different settings without having to slow down the entire production.
