Summary
Ever since high school I loved making videos. Starting off with horror films for a local contest I grew my passion in video making and cinematography over the years until I eventually got into college and dove completely into videography – specifically lighting and camera work. But I was never really interested in making movies, I always leaned more towards the videos that were shorter and were energetic. Coming up with this idea for my senior project was a given – making a series of short advertisements to help me market myself better in the career field? Perfect. I coined the project, “A Foot in Every Door” meaning that with the various types of advertisements I was about to make, I can have a wide range in my portfolio to show to future employers.
For this project, I focused less on narrative, and more on the cinematography and lighting. The focus is the feeling that you get when you watch and listen to these commercials. I decided on 3 commercials – an Audi Commercial, A Piano Commercial for Baldwin, and a Coca-Cola Commercial. Below I will go into the intricacies of each of these projects and why they took a considerable amount of time to plan, shoot, and edit.
Audi – Experience Precision
This advertisement was extremely tricky with the planning and execution. I originally had the idea of a specific shot, which this entire advertisement was spawned from – Rotating the camera along with the RPM meter on the dash of a car. I thought the idea was very unique and interesting and the rest of the ad fell into place. The plan was simple – shoot only during golden hour and try to get as many shots from the passenger window as possible. But in practice, it turned out to be a lot more challenging. I went onto multiple pages and groups for car meets around Rexburg and offered to make an edit for their car if they would be in my commercial. Done fairly easy, I got about 40 requests. I wanted a car that had a unique and interesting interior and the a guy named Josh Heywood had an Audi S5 that I wanted to check out. So I scheduled a shoot! It was going to be an all-interior shoot in his car while parked in a parking garage. I used a combination of an Aputure 600x (with 5′ diffusion using a grid to focus the light) blasting through his driver-side window, An Aputure MC Pro clamped onto his sun shade with 2200k blasted through a eggcrate to give those orange accents, another MC Pro to the side with diffusion to give some fill light, and Another 2200k MC Pro to the back to give a warm kicker to the steering wheel and his gloved hands.
After that shoot was done I needed to get the golden hour shots done. Which ended up being shot in 5 separate sessions because golden hour didn’t really work out perfectly during our filming times and dates. For about 2 months in a row the weather was super cloudy around golden hour so the video reflects this, but I grew to like the look a lot. For some of the shots I hung out the passenger window with my camera and captured wide shots, close ups, and everything I could. But it was very limiting. So I got a friend with a Forerunner to help me get the shots I needed. Here is a shot of how this worked:
I used ratchet straps on my belt loops to secure myself to the back of the car, making sure that I couldn’t fall and hit the placement when we were going high speeds. I used a gimbal (Which later turned out to be a detriment) for a lot of these shots. I got super low and got the various shots of the front of the car, capturing wide shots, and everything in between. I had an idea for the video which was a bit of a risk. Having a section of 1 or 2 seconds in the middle where all the fast-paced music and sound design would stop – and lend itself to a peaceful and serene drone shot from super far away. So I had my friend Christian Martinez fly his drone while I directed him to what I needed in this specific shot. You can see this shot in the video about halfway in. It is immediately accompanied by super fast-paced action shots.
Above you see the sound design I had for this advertisement. A lot of the sound you hear is from the actual Audi, but I put some bassy sound effects in there as well to really give it that push that I wanted. I recorded the sound of his car mainly through a lavalier mic in a tomb of gaff tape right by his exhaust, really interesting idea that I got by my friend Sean Crone but it turned out great! So try to pick out all of those little details when you watch it!
Headphones are recommended when viewing these videos.
Baldwin – Timeless Elegance
This project was immensely fun and I got to really dial in my lighting and camera work for it. It took me quite a while to find the pianist who would play a song suited for the vibe that I wanted in the video but I found the perfect one – Lisa Hansen. She’s actually faculty at the school and did a fantastic job playing the piano in this video.
The idea was simple – Show the timeless elegance of a Baldwin piano. The piano in this video definitely shows its age with scratches, dust and all. But the sound and elegance is what’s important. It sounds beautiful. The video starts with Lisa walking up to the piano with no context, then starts playing an immaculate and complex piece, one that means a lot to her. This shows her passion in piano playing along with product shots around the piano showcasing what Baldwin pianos can do.
So this video worked out a little strangely – I shot it like a music video (Which would be my payment to Lisa) so originally it was about 3.5 minutes long. In other words, wayyy too long for an advertisement. So I narrowed it down to the condensed version which you will see. But I had Lisa play the song through multiple times with my friend Michael recording it and getting the best sound possible.
After it was recorded, we played the audio file through a speaker, blasting at full volume so she could play along to it, helping me sync the audio in post. (A process that took about 8 hours to do well) None of what you see in the video is her actually playing, it’s all a pre-recorded sound-track.
The lighting was the part that I was most focused on. I had my Aputure 600x with 5′ diffusion with a grid lighting modifier (Which you can see in the photo above), 7 Aputure MC Pros inside the actual piano angled at very specific ways to reflect the light perfectly for that wide shot, and an additional Diffused MC Pro to the right giving a very low fill light. I also had some opaque black negative fill that I used to Lisa’s right to give the image a bit more contrast.
Above is a picture of the lighting I had in the piano. The lighting was changed for about every shot I had. In short – it was extremely intense changing the lighting constantly for that perfect look.
Here’s a couple photos of me getting the shots I wanted in the video. This was filmed in the MC special events room and honestly I had a blast with it!
Coca-Cola – The Experience
This ad had the most pre-production by far. I not only had to find the perfect actor, but one that could portray the emotions in the script and be convincing with it. I reached out to someone that I was in one of my short films – Aricin Starks. He became one of the vital roles in the production, and was great to work with thankfully. I had many people on this production, a sound engineer, a gaffer, the actor, a couple grips, and myself of course. I did all the directing, camera work, and lighting for the production but it couldn’t be done without a substantial team supporting me. I wanted to create something old-school for this one. It later turned out to be more old-school than I initially wanted but it was for the better!
So the plan was to get this done in two shoots. One for all the product shots, and one for all the narrative shots. And that part worked out perfectly! Coordinating schedules and locations was a bit tricky though. I shot all the product shots in my apartment’s lounge using many different lighting setups for the various shots. Here are a few photos from that shoot.
Some of the shots (Specifically the macro shots) my lens was actually touching the glass cup! For the shot where the soda was spinning, I had a tripod wrapped in plastic wrap spun by my friend Christian with the Coke bottle balanced on top. The background was my projector screen with a light shining through the back of it (I changed the color of the backlight several times). The reason I put these very colorful product shots in was because this was the part of the advertisement where the protagonist is enjoying the soda, and the colors show what’s going through his head while he’s drinking it.
The narrative part of the soda commercial was uniquely hard to shoot as well. Originally I wanted the protagonist to go to the fridge and be nervous about grabbing the soda, because it wasn’t his. And at the end I would have someone yelling, “WHO TOOK MY COKE?” but in the edit, I realized that I could spin it a different way, and make it more simplistic and focus on the protagonist’s disgust of water instead. The motivation for him getting up is that he just wants the Coca-Cola. I had 4 lighting setups for the shoot including the lighting for the beginning shots, the lighting for the fridge master shot, and smaller lighting setups for the close-ups on his face and such. Here are some photos from the set.
For the lighting here, I had my Aputure 600X Pro outside with no lighting modifiers other than a reflector cone, I wanted the light to be very specular, and have a feeling of moonlight. I then had other lights be the kicker, the fill, practicals, and accenting lights for the scene around the set all tuned to 5600k. I also had my haze machine to give the look a smoky vibe.
In the edit I decided to go with a super old-school look, which fades into a colorful look as he’s drinking the soda. Hopefully, you can spot all the little details in the advertisement!
The Conclusion
I had a blast working on this project. The planning alone for the three advertisements turned out to be over 50 hours and all-in-all the project reached over 100 hours easily. These commercials will help me get future jobs and not only helped me boost my skill, but helped boost other people’s skill that helped me on the project. I am happy with how the videos turned out and am glad that I chose this specific project to do. I hope you enjoyed learning about how I completed this project!
Here’s the rig that I used for all three advertisements.
Cast and Crew
- River Pinhey (Cinematographer, Director, Editor)
- Christian Martinez (Gaffer, Key Grip, Drone Operator, Photographer)
- Michael Michelsen (Audio Engineer, Boom operator)
- Freddy Fang (Gaffer, Grip, Photographer)
- Sean Crone (Audio Engineer, Boom Operator)
- Isabelle Jimison (Audio Engineer)
- Connor Mcfarlane (Grip, Photographer)
- Chad Larkin (Camera Car Driver)
- Aricin Starks (Coca-Cola Protagonist)
- Josh Heywood (Audi Driver, Protagonist)
- Lisa Hansen (Pianist)
- Cameron Robins (Faculty Mentor)
- Simon Jackson (Voice-Over Artist)