Qualtrics Breakthrough Artist Award
This project was a really fun and difficult challenge. I needed to film footage of a custom etched guitar that Qualtrics uses as an award to their customers for excellence. The most difficult part of this project was how reflective the guitar was. It was like a black mirror. The main requirements were to incorporate the four Qualtrics colors, have the shots start very abstract and slowly build to a big reveal of the guitar. We started by doing test shots with a probe lens to see if we could make the guitar other worldly and then a turn table to have a nice reveal of light. Theses were all done about a year before the actual project was going to be released. The only thing that changes on the guitars year to year is the date so we were able to use some of these shots in the final piece. For this post I will break down each of the different types of set ups we had: Turntable, Slider Macro, Probe Lens and color lighting tubes. Some of these techniques where also used interchangeably but it will help me organize the huge amount of footage we shot over almost 2 year project.
Turntable Shots
This was a pretty straightforward set up on a turntable of the guitar spinning. We had two different tables a slower 2 minute rotation table and a faster 30 second rotation table. Most of the lighting was very sidle to give good definition and variety as it spun. Because of the reflective nature of the guitar it took a lot of trial and error to get it to do the full 360 spin without seeing any unwanted objects in the guitar. Any small light piece of anything would show up in the reflection. The most difficult part was the full body shot of the guitar. We wanted to be able to see top to bottom of it without noticing it was on a stand. We modified a guitar stand and used a little bit of gaff tape to hold it upright. It worked well and was small enough that it wasn’t very difficult to remove the small amount that remained in post.
Slider Macro Shots
For the majority of the macro shots I used the Tokina 100mm Macro 2.8 lens. We did also use the Probe lens for some of the macro shots but I will get into that in the next section. This made it possible for very fine detailed shots. We placed the camera on a Rhino slider Arc II to be able to have some very slight movement. For the lighting we used a book light bounced off a piece of foam core and a 4x4 216 of diffusion. Once we had it set up the way we liked the camera stayed pretty much in the same spot and we simply rotated the guitar to get the different angles we wanted. To add a little more interest to the shot we would put a 2x3 flag between the light and the guitar and slowly move it out of the way to create a reveal of light across the product. This worked really well and I am super happy with the effects it created.
Probe Lens Shots
The probe lens creates such a unique and fun angle that it was hard to not spend all of my time shooting with it. The Loawa 24mm probe is not a fast lens the widest aputure it has is a f14. So in order to film with it you need a lot of light so for this section we rented a M18. We used that as the main source to bounce off a large 6x6 ultra bounce behind the guitar to give a really nice sheen across it.
The other major challenge with the probe lens is how it notices every tiny little bump. We used the Rhino slider for many of the shots but still noticed a slight bump as it went that caused a shake. Luckily it was something we could take out in post through simple stabilization. We also used apple boxes to put the guitar on so we could adjust the height in comparison to the camera to get the lens as close to the top of the guitar as possible to make it feel a little out of this world. We did use this technique for when the lens moves directly over the strings of the guitar and placing the guitar on its side so we could get further down the strings.
RGB Lighting Tubes
This was the most challenging and funnest part to figure out for this whole shoot. We wanted to use the tubes as a way to show off the four different colors for each of the product lines within qualtrics. Each color represented a different product. We wanted to have each of the lights move over the different parts of the product as well as a line of all the lights across the whole guitar. We tried this a couple of different ways.
Our first attempt was to simply move each of the lights overtop the guitar. However, having the lights on a c stand and arcing them over the guitar caused some issues in terms of where the reflection showed up and the movement wasn’t quite what we were looking for. So the next thing we tired was have each of the lights stationary and have the guitar and camera on a dolly track below that would be pushed over top. This worked fairly well and we were able to get some good shots out of this. However the biggest issue was the camera was a little shaky attached to the dolly so we could get any good close up shots.
For our final attempt we attached the lights to a dana dolly system moved those over the guitar to give the look. This worked really well but didn’t quite allow for enough travel in the lights to go to total darkness. But between the camera being on the dolly track and the lights on the dana dolly we were able to accomplish the shots that we wanted. It was a ton of trial and error and it took just over a full week of shooting to get all the shots we wanted.
We also used the color tubes to highlight the edge of the guitar to create a really cool flashing effect between the colors. We filmed 5 different times turning off each light at a time to create a flashing cool effect.
Conclusion
In the end we were all very proud of what we were able to come up with. The plan was to have these shots play in the background while a live performance went on stage to show off the guitar and hand it out to the winners. However due to COVID 19 it was cancelled so we had to pivot to online awards. That is where the video came into play as we cut the footage together into a shorter punchier piece as a come sign up for the award. All in all I was happy I got to work on this project and excited that it will actually see the light of day. If you want to check out the final website and read about the winners check out this website.