Filming During COVID-19
The Situation
Qualtrics wanted to host an online event for anyone interested in learning more about experience management and more importantly how companies have pivoted because of Covid 19. Now the majority of the project was done remotely. We simply sent out iphone kits to people to be able to set up at home and we would record the sessions through an online app. However for our keynote speaker and Co founder of Qualtrics, Ryan Smith, they wanted to production value to be a little better and so we decided to film it in his home in park city. Due to the Covid 19 restrictions and guidelines we tried the best we could to keep the crew as small as possible. It was a two camera set up with a teleprompter. The crew consisted of 4 people plus the executive crew from Qualtrics like copywriter, marketing director and so forth. So in total we had about 10 people there.
The Shoot
For the look the director wanted it to feel very naturally lit. Nothing that called major attention to lighting but still give him a nice clean look. So for this I planned on doing a cove light. Basically you use large bounces surrounding the subject and bounce the light off of it to create a very soft natural source. The great cinematographer Roger Deakins uses this type of light all of the time.
The other limitation we had was only being able to rely on house power to power all of these lights. Which did limit a little bit the type of lights I could get. So I rented a joker kit. With an 1600, 800 and 400. Now we didn’t use the 400 but the 1600 and 800 were just barely enough to give us the light we wanted because we were filming large windows as well and balancing the exposure to the outside was difficult with such little light but I think it worked out rather well.
Ryan showed up we spend the time needed to film the shots and packed it all up and went home. It was so nice to be back on set even with such a simple set up. It did take three times as long with so few people and trying hard to keep social distancing and all but I was happy with the end result.
Color Correction
On this project I was in charge of doing the final color correction on this video. I made some very simple color luts for this and sent it to the creative director to choose which look he wanted to go with. After a little bit of tweaking we got to a place we were happy with. The color wasn’t too difficult as we shot in Prores 422HQ so there was a lot of color to play with as well as the 14ish stops of dynamic range on the Blackmagic URSA mini Pros. Here are some pictures of before and after as well as the node tree I used to create the look.
