Thanks everyone for all the kind words about these BTS posts. Normally I would stop talking about the show and move on to the next one at this point, but the current situation doesn’t allow for that so I will keep rambling, lol.
Alicia is one of the survivors in Jeffrey Epsten: Filthy Rich. The director decided she wanted 2 shots of extreme focal lengths. A full body shot on A cam and an ECU on B cam. This can be quite challenging and I love it. A wide interview shot introduces many factors. The environment you are in becomes much more prominent as well as becoming part of the story. The wider angle of view means you see more of the background and on top of that you have more perceived depth of field so the background will have sharper focus than usual putting the subject in danger of blending in with the background and not popping.
You can deal with this in a few ways. The first thing I do is build in lighting contrast. Here you see that Alicia is brighter and the background is darker so she has separation. You can also build in color contrast with the subject’s wardrobe.
I wanted to light Alicia with soft light, but due to the wide shot we had to keep the key light further away than normal so it wouldn’t be in the shot. The further away a light is, the harder it is, so we went “big” with a couple of 12×12’s next to each other.
This gave us soft light, but soft light spreads everywhere so we had to direct the heck out of it to keep it on Alicia and off the background. We uses fabric LCD’s on the 12x’s to direct the light as well as 12x solids to control the spill.
I am pretty happy with the way the shot came out and most importantly Alicia was comfortable. She was talking about an extremely traumatic event and I wanted her to forget about all the filmmaking equipment and just have a natural conversation
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