Favorite Shots of 2016 Pt. 3 of 4

This summer I had the amazing experience of shooting a completely independent pilot titled The Blockade Runner. I have never been on a shoot where everyone was so passionate about the project but overall just wanted to have fun and I think that energy really shines through with this. This shot comes from the opening scene of this first episode where a mysterious girl lies in the forest at night. She reaches up into the sky and a single drop of blood falls onto her cheek.

This scene takes place on a distant planet so I wanted the night to feel surreal and a bit cooler than normal to contrast with the very warm daytime scene right after this one. Due to budget and time constraints, we had to shoot this scene day for night. I accomplished this by having our actress (Laura Dromerick) lie down in the shade where there was dense wood to camera right and open field to camera left. This position was shielded from direct sunlight allowing me to work solely with a very blue daylight along with having the line of trees act as a natural negative fill. On top of that I added a silk just above Laura to help soften the light even more. You can see the straight out of camera image below.

After getting the image into DaVinci, I brought down the levels and increased the blue in the highlights. I have never been the largest fan of day for night shooting but overall, I am actually pretty pleased with this shot and how the entire scene turned out.

If you are at all interested in learning more about The Blockade Runner, you can visit the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/TheBlockadeRunner/

Camera: Canon C100 MkII into Ninja

Lens: Zeiss ZE 35mm