Filming a Shoe
The Situation
We had two shots left to shoot for the Under Armour video which were the most time consuming and fun to shoot, the shoes. I didn’t include this in the other two Under Armour posts because of the amount of time and effort put into getting these two shots of the shoes that I felt it deserved its own post.
The big ask that we had was to make the shoe feel like it was floating in space and to have the feeling of being a 3D render even though it was shot all practical.
The Gear
One of the big asks was to save money and try and do it all with the gear we had in house. The only thing that we did have to rent was a lens. This was the Laowa 15mm macro lens. We used this lens to get as close as possible but still see most of the shoe. This helped sell the 3D model effect on the shoe. Next we used two sliders from Edelkrone. Sliderone and Sliderplus with the action module on it. This allowed us to get some really dynamic shots of the camera moving around the shoe.
The Shoot
We attached the shoe to one slider and the camera to the other so the two could move independtly of each other to help give a little more parallax to the shot. What we wanted to do was have a robotic arm to flip the camera and shoe all around but of course that was out of our budget.
Once we got the shoe set up we place a aputure 300D with a soft box over top of the shoe and one of us would slowly pan it off the shoe as the sliders moved to give a nice dynamic reveal of light over the shoe. At first we used a grid to help control the spill of the light but that proved to be a problem when the pattern of the grid showed up in the reflection of the shoe and made it look really odd. So as a work around we wrapped the light dome with black wrap to create a make shift snoot over the light. This worked like a charm. Here are the first two test shots we did with the grid that we discovered the issue in the reflection. Look at the back of the shoe you can see the grid show up.
Getting the perfect angle of the shoe took the most work and getting the shoe to suspended with as little requirement for having to remove stuff in post was also very difficult. Some of the angles were a little too sharp and our CD didn’t like how bulky the soul of the shoe was so we had to be very deliberate and strategic on what angles to film the shoe. But the final product turned out amazing and I was super proud of it.
I put together a quick cut of all of my favorite shots of the shoe and put it into a little edit so you can see some of the ones that didn’t make the final cut and the ones that did.