THE SNAP FACTORY (by Luke Launer)

NAB 2013 was an amazing experience for me! I was flown to Vegas and worked with Atomos, helping them on their booth with color grading presentations. I talked about 10-bit colour spaces, compression and why they matter. I also demo'd some grading examples in EDIUS and DaVinci and received great feedback from the attendees :) It was an awesome week! So many new advancements for the film-maker - the most exciting developments for me being LED lighting. The future is bright!

As I stepped off my 15hr flight back home in Australia, I drove straight to a shoot for Luke Launer as DP for his new film "The Snap Factory". No shower, no nothing. I was wired!! We shot into the early morning and suffice to say, I was exhausted the next day, but really happy with some of the shots I got that night. Below is one of my favorites...... ​

For a higher detailed image, see HERE

This scene is where our protagonist finds a friend in his dark and gritty cell of The Snap Factory. Luke wanted a black void to surround the actors which meant I had to be careful with light bouncing onto walls, etc. ​

The scarlet holds up well at 800 ISO, as long as you give your subject enough light. I always take a look at my "RAW" exposure to check what is really going on, and then tweak my lighting accordingly. As you can see on the histogram, the image should be filled with noise and is super under-exposed. I've learned not to trust my histogram and use "RAW" as my exposure guide, judging the image by eye. It's working a treat!​

The low wattage tungsten Fresnels (150w dimmable)​ are some of my favorite lights in a kit. They are so tiny and easy to use, perfect for hair lights and selective lighting. One of them I used as a hair/back light which was aimed from up high, pointed down, directly at the back of my subject. The second 150w was set to spot and pointed at the ground just in front of the actor to bounce some fill into his face. The diffused LED was on the ground pointing up and dimmed to taste for some extra fill and eye ping ;) I'm really happy with the results. Here's the reversal:

For more shots from this shoot, check out my blog post here :)​

For more lighting setups, check out the LIGHTING section at the top of this page :)

Posted on April 18, 2013 .