Sweeping and simply engaging, another great piece from Nexus Productions and Clapham Road Studios– ‘Back to the Start’ by Director Johnny Kelly with Director of Photography Matthew Day.
Chipotle commissioned this impressive short to show their support for sustainable farming practices. The downloadable soundtrack is a quietly compelling cover of Coldplay’s ‘the Scientist’ sung by Willie Nelson.
The lighting seamlessly communicates the film’s story progression.
Director Johnny Kelly: “Our DP Matthew Day did some incredible things with Dragon – hooking up several motion control rigs and over forty space lights to change / react as we advanced to each subsequent frame.” Lighting was controlled with the help of the Dragon DDMX2.
Matthew talks to us about mastering this complex shoot:
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- The idea behind the lighting was to try to emphasize the different moods of the farmer as we travel with him through the changing seasons and times of the day.
It was obvious that a two minute shot would be too long to light, shoot and animate in one go, so I suggested to Johnny that we could break the shot into four manageable segments using different parts of the set to wipe in front of the camera giving the illusion of one continuous move. I worked closely with Graham Staughton, the production designer and Mark Davies the 3D previs artist to achieve this. We lined the rig and sets back up at the beginning of each week then started programming and lighting again using the previs, overlaying the live feed in Dragon as a guide.
We used an Arri studio 10k lamp for the key light and the fill light was from space lights overhead through frames with Grid cloth as low to the set as possible. We supplemented the space lights with extra 1 and 2k’s with coloured gels, this wrapped around the fronts of the puppets quite nicely and hopefully looked fairly natural without getting in the way of the moco rig or the animator. Due to the fact that the lighting had to change as the camera moved along, all the lights were programmed to be digitally dimmed using the dragon dmx controller. I wanted to keep the shadows from changing angle too much so we manually tracked the 10k along with the action, and as the sun started to set we wound down its stand to lengthen the shadows and dimmed down the lamp which gave a warmer, more evening like, quality of light. The DMX controller in dragon allowed us to preview the lighting transitions at different frame rates and exactly control the levels. This would have been impossible without the DMX facility in Dragon as we had to shoot multiple clean passes of the move, some of which took nearly 4 hours. The whole shoot took a month and a lot of late nights!
-Matthew Day
Making it look easy.
The equally epic making of video:
See more production stills
