How to Film A Date Night Commercial Breakdown - Low Budget Filmmaking BTS

So this is a low budget commercial for a new restaurant out in Los Angeles. It's sort of a skit video where a girl is texting her boyfriend about a date night. He's trying to text her and, you know, try to convince her to go to the lounge that he really wants to check out. And so she's getting dressed up and getting the makeup done. And they go on the date and they arrive at the restaurant. And then we go inside the restaurant to kind of see what it's like inside. And they sit down and they order one of the signature alcoholic beverages that come in a bowl. And that's basically the commercial. As you can tell, it's pretty low budget. There's lots of stuff that I do want to go over, some setups, and I also want to go over what kind of things I would have done differently. And there's quite a lot. So let's get the gear out of the way first. I'm using the Canon C70 as my main camera along with the Tamron 24-70 zoom lens for pretty much all of the shots besides one extreme closeup shot of the bowl being placed down. That was shot with the Canon EOS R with the 70-200 lens. For my lighting, I am using a Godox VL-150 with a 4x4 butterfly frame with diffusion going through it. And then also a huge 5-in-1 reflector that I got off of Amazon. I'll link everything down below in the description. We did have one other Godox SL-150 that I didn't have time to set up initially. And I wish as we got further into the production, I actually took the time to set that up, but we were just running around and kind of running out of time. For our crew, it's just me and my wife shooting and setting everything up pretty much how it is on every one of our low budget commercials. So with that out of the way, let's dive into the breakdown. So this wide shot of the first scene is our actress sitting on the couch and she's lit by using that Godox VL-150 that I was talking about. And that's shooting through the 4x4 off the screen right. And that's giving her a really nice soft key light. And then on the other side, I'm filling in the shadows using that 5-in-1 reflector to not make her face super contrasty. Usually when I see women's faces being lit on commercials and movies, they're usually not as contrasty versus men's faces. There's still some contrast in her face, but it's not super heavy. And you can actually see the shininess of the reflector on her right cheekbone right here. And truth be told, I am not super totally in love with the shot. It's nice and it gets the job done. One thing I would have done differently was just add more lights to the background. It's super dark because we turned off all the lights and closed off all the curtains and pretty much stopped all the light from coming into the room because we were shooting in the afternoon and this was supposed to be like 7 p.m. at night. So I wish we could have added something into the background, either an edge light or created some sort of like a light pattern on the background and the floor so it's not as boring so that we can actually see something in the background. But it's funny as a filmmaker working for a client, it doesn't really matter what you think of the shot. And as long as a client feels like their commercial is being lit decently enough, they don't really care about all the other fancy stuff that goes on to the frame. I say this because I gave a little monitor, this monitor actually right here, the Atomos Ninja 5, and I gave it to them for Video Village so that they can see what was going on. And when I turned on the light with the four by four diffusion and they saw the actual frame, I heard them in the corner of the room, they were like whispering to each other, oh my God, this is so amazing, Liz, like this shot looks so beautiful. And in my head, I'm like, what? There's no way, there's just no way we're looking at the same shot. Like to me, as a cinematographer, it looks okay, it's fine. Like I said, it does a job, but I wish there were so many more things that I would have done to the shot. For example, here, there's a lot of hotspots on her face, on her body, and I would have loved to like soften that out with a bigger diffusion. These are just tiny little things that would have like made the shot better, but we had to move fast and quick throughout the day and low budget doesn't mean that you don't try to make your shots look good. And in fact, it's actually the opposite. You try even harder to make your shots look good because now you're working with limited equipment and also time. Now, going back to the breakdown, we have our actress sitting in the L of the couch where the two halves of the couch meet. Now, Patrick from Wandering DP over on his YouTube channel and his podcast always talks about creating leading lines by shooting into the corner of a room. Classic point with the framework is you wanna, especially when you're in interiors and you're looking into the L of the room, this is the L of the room. See how there's this little break back here in the room? That's the wall, one wall going this way, other wall going this way. It creates depth when you do that. And depth is a good thing because it makes things seem more interesting because then we can add contrast and make the objects feel like they are three dimensional. But instead of shooting into the corner of a room, I'm shooting into the corner of a couch. The reason why I chose a high angle shot was because it was actually the owner of the restaurant's house that we were shooting at and we couldn't really do anything in terms of set design nor do we have the time or the budget to do stuff like that. And so literally if I lowered the camera, we would see the bed, the paintings, there were paintings back there and there were like sculptures and it's really out of place to see that in this commercial. So this was the only angle that I could get in order to avoid seeing anything in the background. Then going from the wide shot to the closeup, it's a over the shoulder closeup of the phone just so that we can see what she's looking at. And again, I'm using another method that Patrick teaches over on his YouTube channel where he calls it the credit card shot. We did in the last video, we looked at the non-frameworky version of the credit card shot. This is the framework version. Easiest shot in the world. Put a four by frame just over there, bring the light over the top, add some neg this side to suck up all of this. If you want more contrast, more neg. That's it. So in this case, the subject is the phone. The light should be in between the background and the subject. And our camera is shooting towards the light in order to catch as much contrast as possible. And it's a really popular way to make closeups a lot more cinematic. So moving into the bathroom scene where she's getting ready, you can clearly see that this is not an evening shoot because of this window being pretty bright in the background. This window just completely ruins the whole illusion of 7 p.m. in the evening. And that's just something that we could not avoid because of just how the mirrors were positioned on the wall in relation to the window in that background. But we shot it hoping that people didn't notice that it's not really technically 7 p.m. in the evening, but that window is actually giving our actress a little bit of an edge light or a fill light here on her cheek. And also you can kind of see it here on the shoulder, which is nice because it makes her a little bit more defined but that was definitely not intentional. And then I had the Godox VL150 with a comb reflector attached. And I placed that on a light stand and placed it into the corner of the room. And now that I'm watching it back, it definitely is a little bit too hard. I think the main problem is that we see it on the wall in the back right here. And I would have loved to flag that off, but I only had barn doors to flag the light as best as I could. And that can only get you so far. Now, the other thing was that there was this skylight in the ceiling that we could not flag off either. And so we had this kind of like spotlight of just sunlight that was just coming down. It's soft, but it is noticeable, especially in this shot of her putting on the dress. You can definitely see that skylight right there in the shot on her shoulder. And there was just really nothing else that we could do. I wish we had more equipment to just raise a flag up to the ceiling and just block that light off. In this bathroom scene, I did try my hardest to introduce more contrast by switching to the black side of the reflector and using it as negative fill to block off and suck up some of the light that was bouncing from the relatively bright walls. This is a really low budget technique of attaching the reflector to the C-stand where I literally used a little hook thing on the end of the reflector and just hung it onto the C-stand and raised the C-stand up as high as possible without hitting the ceiling and tried to get it as close to the actress as possible so we didn't see it in frame. But because the night was pretty big, we were able to block off and take out some of the fill light that was hitting our actress. Now, this shot here of her putting on her lipstick is lit by reflecting the Godox light off the mirror that she's facing. So that's why this shot will look a little bit different. It looks a little bit harsh and that's because whenever you reflect light off of a mirror, it's always gonna be harsh unless you diffuse it, which we didn't diffuse. And you can see that the specular highlight here on her nose is a little bit small. And then you can also see that her eye light is also small. And it's kind of a dead giveaway that the light is a little bit sourcey, which means that it's not spread out as much and it just doesn't look as pleasing. I think maybe I could have taped diffusion paper over the mirror, so that would soften up the light a lot more. But at the time, I didn't think of that. Okay, so we move into the nighttime exterior. And in this wide shot of the car pulling up, I have the VL-150 with a softbox off to the screen right to give our actors some level because it's really dark over there. There was no lighting whatsoever. And you can see the reflection of the light in the car right here. It's really quick, so you don't really notice it, but yeah, it's there. And in the medium shot, when they get out of the car, you can see the soft light on his face, but it just still looks way too shiny. And the reason for that is because the diffusion is too small and it's also too far away. I really, really, really wish I would have brought in that light closer to them because that would take off a lot of the harshness because now the light source is bigger and we will see less of that harshness, especially on their face and on their skin. And then I use the Zhiyun Crane 3S to shoot this gimbal shot of me panning down from the logo of the restaurant. And then they walk into this wall of fake grass. For next time though, I definitely will want to pull out that podium that you see at the very end of the wall of fake grass and just pull that all the way up to the front so that our actors don't walk into this like darkness of fake walls. And it's just a small little blocking thing that I think would have made a huge difference being able to see the actors interacting with whoever's at the podium in the light. Now, the next shot is a wide shot of the couple sitting down at their table and then a server brings down a bowl that they're ordering. This is the signature alcoholic beverage that comes in a bowl. It's really nicely decorated and garnished and everything. This shot was really hard to make it look really cinematic because the table is actually bolted down to the floor and the seating is right up against the wall. It's just attached to the wall, which means that we can't add any depth to the shot by moving the actors away from the wall. But I'm still trying to apply as much cinematography techniques as much as possible by shooting into, again, the L or the corner of the room. And by doing so, I'm just trying to create more depth to the shot. And then for lighting, I have the warm tungsten chandelier house lights that are coming in from the top. And then I have the Godox VL150 with the soft box off to the screen right. And when we cut to the closeup of the actors, the VL150 is now on the far side of the frame to create some contrast in their faces. And then in the last closeup of the phone, it's another credit card shot where the light is off to the far side of the camera of the frame. And it's wrapping around the phone over the top of her hands and also creating shadows in the palms. And that's how you kind of make the shot look a little bit more, again, cinematic by using this credit card technique. And then that takes us out to the logo. I hope you found this breakdown helpful. It's always good to go over your own work to see what kind of mistakes you made, things that you could have done differently. Hopefully this helps you guys because cinematography is a never ending journey of learning. So that is it for this video. I hope you guys liked it. If you did, hit that like button. Make sure you subscribe for more videos just like this. Until the next one, my name is Alex Chung and I'll see you later, bye. Bye.