in was fairly small, making shooting the
talent with two cameras challenging.
The main difficulties were: the location
really didn’t look like a corporate work-
space, it looked like a nice apartment
living room; and, from an art direction
perspective, there was little to work
with, and white walls are deadly boring
to look at.
Fortunately, the apartment had a
nice black AV cabinet and LED TV
on the wall. So I decided that I could
have one of the engineers hook up his
laptop to the LED so that he could
show some of the work that they had
been performing on the TV screen in
the background.
My Workflow When Shooting OMB
- Before you do anything else, set up
your two cameras. You have to choose
the camera location, and you cannot
check framing, composition, back-
grounds or much else until you set up
your cameras and look at what they’ll
see of the location.
Once you have set up both cameras and
received client sign off on their position
and the frames, then you can go to work
lighting your setup. When working as an
OMB, you’re often stuck with practical
locations and often cannot really change
the amount of ambient light. - I build my key light first. In this case,
I used my medium Chimera with an
Aputure Lightstorm LS-1S LED panel
as my key source. A medium Chimera
is fairly large for a small room, measur-
ing roughly 3x4 feet. So I build it first
to make sure it will fit where I want
to use it. If not, plan B is to go to a
smaller-sized key source. In this case,
the medium Chimera fit, although
just barely. - When shooting as an OMB in small
rooms, use an egg crate on your key
source, if possible. This prevents the key
source from lighting up the background
and prevents the soft light from spilling
everywhere resulting in flat, dull lighting.- In this setup, I had a boring white
wall behind the talent that I wanted
to do something with. So I decided to
light it with a 10-inch RGB LED light,
the Luxli Cello. This light has been a
huge timesaver over traditional Arri
650 Tungsten lights with dimmers and
gels and the end result with the Cello
is actually better with deeper, more
saturated colors than the gels with the
ARRIs can deliver. - I added a little fill light on the engi-
neers from camera left using a Kam-
erar Brightcast LED panel through a
42-inch diffusion disc. - Once I’m satisfied with the lighting
setup, I always leave enough time for
setting up audio properly. Do a sound
check. In most corporate and inter-
view-driven projects, audio is more
important than the picture. So take
the time to set up audio correctly.This sort of setup with two cam-
eras, two talent and three to five
lights and sound is my personal limit
for shooting solo.
I know of a talented DP who won’t
shoot solo without a sound mixer.
However, I’m personally comfortable
with sound, so I can shoot some proj-
ects that the other DP cannot.
Hopefully, you’ve found this primer
on the limits of shooting as a one-man
band helpful. Shooting video and cin-
ema is a team sport, but occasionally
you may have to take the field solo. DPPHappiness is hours of battery power to keep
your camera, monitor and lights running. You
cannot over prepare, only under prepare.
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