How I Shot a Commercial in RAW with Canon C200 (Low Light!) | Behind the Scenes

Welcome back to the channel. My name is Alex Chung, and today we're going to be breaking down the commercial that you just saw. We're going to be going over some of the low light scenes and how I shot it and how I lit it. And it was a fun, cheesy video that we did for Calamitos Ranch, and they're getting ready to announce their new drive-in theater so that guests can still be socially distant and still have fun at the ranch. So we shot this on the Canon C200 with the Tamron 24-70mm f2.8 lens at 4K, 24 frames per second, and the DJI Mavic Air for those two drone shots that you saw in the video. And I also have the Tiffin Black ProMist quarter filter so that I can bloom out some of the highlights to make them not as harsh. And this whole thing was edited on the Adobe Premiere Pro and color graded in DaVinci Resolve. The main thing that I want to focus on for this video is the low light scene with our actor and actress, where they're watching the movie in the car. The beginning shots were also shot on raw and they were handheld, but we didn't have any lighting setups to go with them. Now to watch a movie, you obviously want the entire environment to be dark, but that doesn't really help when you are trying to film something. So how do we fix that? We of course light our location. And the two lights that I used, the first one is the Godox VL150, and I set that up sort of as a side light to pretend like there's a street light or some sort of light coming in from the side of the car. We didn't put any diffusion or any gels on the light. The only thing that we did was put the little cone reflector thingy on the light to control the spill of the light to just focus it right through that car window. The VL150 is a light that I just got not too long ago. I'm very excited to finally use it on a shoot. And it's a lot more affordable than the aperture options that you have. And in my opinion, it works just as well. And you guys can see the quality and the accuracy of the light that's hitting our talent's faces. For our second light, we use the RGB tube lights from Luminate who are kind enough to send these out to me. This is not sponsored by them at all. I just thought this was a perfect opportunity to take these out on an aftershoot and test them out. What's cool about these LED lights is that you can program them to flash and display different colors from the Luminate app on your smartphone. You can control the exact color of it, the brightness, the exact order of how they're going to flash and how fast they flash. So my idea for this commercial was to use these tube lights to try and simulate something playing on the movie screen. Now in real life, the movie screen wouldn't actually really play that much into the actor's faces. You won't really see the scenes and the shots like moving across the actor's faces. So we had to fake it. But the colors and the light has to be believable. So we're not going to put like pink or purple or like bright green to program them onto the light. Because usually you wouldn't really see those solid colors flashing over the screen. So instead what I did was white, light yellow, yellow, orange, and maybe like light blue somewhere in there. And I didn't want the colors to change super fast like we're at a nightclub because usually shots last a little bit more than a second for each color. So we wanted to slow them down at a believable pace. The idea for this skit was to show our couple watching a comedy movie, a horror movie, and a romantic movie. And that was to show like different types of movies that you can watch at the drive-in theater. And for each genre I tried to program in different colors to try and match the type of movie that they're watching. And my favorite one was a scary movie scene where we just on accident had the actress react to the scene and the red light from the LED tube just like shot across the entire frame and it just made it seem like the movie, something terrible was going on in the movie. And it just was like perfect timing on that. Besides directing our actor and actress, my wife Miao Miao also was in charge of holding up the tube light so that it was lighting up our actors. A couple things I told her to do was to hold the tube light very still because we didn't want to see the shadow of the tube light or her hand or her body appearing in the shot itself. And number two was to hold it up high and in the same direction that our couple was looking at. If you had the light on the other side of their face, it wouldn't really make sense because they look like they're looking in the opposite direction of where the movie screen was supposed to be. So that would look super, super awkward. So even though we were trying to fake some of the lighting, we also have to make it as believable as possible. My wife also brought in some of the Christmas lights that we had from last year and to just give it that date night romantic movie type feel and it really helped to add another layer of depth of lighting to the shot and we were just gaff taping it to the roof of the car. And here's where you can see that black ProMist filter at work. The slight glow around those little lights is caused by that filter and I really like that hazy feel that it provides not only to the Christmas lights, but also to the highlights in the other parts of the image. Like look at the white blanket on the left edge of the screen. You see how it's not like completely blown out. It still sort of has that hazy glow and to me that looks like we shot it on film and it gives that glow, that nice highlight roll-off and also bleeds into like the face, the hands and also the hair. When we were actually shooting it, we locked off the shot on a tripod. We tried to use the trunk and the car to frame our talent inside it. We set the ISO to 500, which to some people might seem super low, especially because it's a super 35mm sensor, but remember when you are properly lighting your scene, you don't have to crank that ISO all the way up to get a well-lit image. Here's the ungraded raw footage and you can see that there's a minimal amount of noise even in the shadowy parts of the image. It's not a lot and it's really easily cleaned up using noise reduction in DaVinci Resolve. And here's a side-by-side comparison of the ungraded and graded footage and you can see just how important lighting your scene is because you'll have a lot less headaches in post-production. And I've got to say these tube lights really made a huge difference in the final edit of the video. They were bright enough and held up really well in the dark and you can see in another shot where we get B-roll of the projectionist, I had someone else help me hold the tube light and shine it at the projector and it looked really, really good. What's awesome about these types of tube lights is that they're super small and portable, which means you don't have to set up an entire light on a C-stand, which can get a little bit clunky. Because of the smaller size, you can fit it into tighter spaces. Like here in this shot where we're in the car, we can hold the tube light right up close to light the hand switching the radio station and that's way easier and quicker than setting up an actual light. And that's it. That's the breakdown of our simple lighting setup. And as you can tell, it doesn't take that much to make a scene look good. We only used like two lights, maybe three if you counted the Christmas lights and that was it. So hopefully that gives you some sort of inspiration for your next shoot. If you like this video, please hit that like button. Make sure to subscribe, hit the bell to get notified of every video that I post. I'm going to be doing more of these BTS videos and other filmmaking gear review videos. So stay tuned for that. Until the next one, my name is Alex Chung and I'll see you later. Bye.