Working with ExxonMobil on their upcoming advertising print job was interesting and definitely had its fair share of challenges regarding pre-production. During pre-pro meetings, we spent many hours reviewing the “go-by’s” given to us by the client. (A ‘Go-by” is what the client gives us to show what the final ad should look like).
This job presented some logistical challenges regarding lighting and execution. What the client was looking for was to show 1 vehicle, and have the front half of the vehicle be inside a body shop - while the back half of the vehicle was to be outside a residential home. It was basically going to mimic a diptique but look like a singe image.
The first challenge that we came across was making sure the perspective was exactly the same from our first location to our second location so that our car would match up perfectly in coach.
Another challenge was to make the lighting on the car itself look natural both inside the body shop and outside the home, which presented issues because inside the shop, there is no hard sunlight. But outside, there is plenty of hard sun. So we had to figure out a way to light both scenes where it would blend together seamlessly.
To fix the first issue; perspective - we ended up locking down a specific camera angle first on that day, and then measured the height of the camera to the middle of the sensor, and also measured the distance to the center of the car, while making sure the camera was in the exact same spot in each shot, in relation to the vehicle. Woah, thats a lot of words. But I promise you it worked great.
After shooting the first location in front of the house, we brought that image into the computer to use as a reference, brining it into capturing one and having it on a lower opacity over what we were tethering at our second location.
The parts of the vehicle that we tried to line up when we were in capture one, was the window frame and the frame of the car.
Now we get to lighting: Our idea for this was we should get the garage to look as much like hard sun as possible (like had huge windows all over the place) so that it would blend with the exterior shot in post. As well as lighting the car, we also had to light the subject working on the car. Because shooting cars is similar to just shooting sheet metal and it comes across super reflective, we had to shoot this in pieces knowing we would be compositing.
To light our talent, we used a hard elinchrome rotolux with a silver lining, similar to a parabolic, to give it a crisp look to match sunlight.
Something else to mention was that we specifically shot on the PhaseOne IQ3 100MP medium format camera because we knew the shots were going torquier a huge amount of retouching. The files from this camera are extremely large, and it really allows you to manipulate the files without losing their detail. This camera definitely has its benefits, and is super fun to use. But it can also slow things down and the images sometimes tend to look more staged because you are shooting less freely, and more purposeful.
