How I shot a feature film with 3 Dedo Lights, a China ball and 7 shower curtains

Josefina Vilsmaier, Mirijam Verena Jeremic, Salber Williams,
Silke Popp, Valentina Sauca, Ute Bronder

Winner “Best International Feature Film” at Toronto Film Festival

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Let it snow

The film takes place in an apartment, during a blizzard. So my first challenge was to create a frosty white-out, despite the fact that in front of the windows where still trees with green leaves in the warm autumn sunshine.

Since we didn’t have the biggest budget, I got 7 cheap shower curtains and told the set designer to put them on the outside of the windows.

Worked like a charm 🙂

Also it gave me a pretty good diffusion, for shots near the windows, and some nice soft light as a baselight, setting the tone for a frosty, gloomy day.

Lights on

The camera was set to 3800 Kelvin, giving me a nice color contrast and separation between the cold light from the windows, and the warm light from the practicals.

The Practicals where all tungsten bulbs on a dimmer, to control brightness and make them even warmer. Than I augmented the practicals with 3 classic (tungsten) Dedo Lights.

Most of the time I used some sort of diffusion, bounce or book light for the Dedos. Then I did the rest of the look in Davinci Resolve.

This is the only scene, where we used 2 additional 4-bank Flolights (with full CTB) outside of the windows.

In the kitchen, we installed a China Ball with a 100W tungsten bulb on a dimmer as both – a practical, and for general lighting, since there are a lot of super wide scenes at and around the table – two birds with one stone.

There is also a candle light scene in the kitchen, where I used a flicker bulb in an open pancake. I dimmed down the China ball, to raise the overall levels a bit, the rest was again, 2 bounced Dedo lights.

Glas and camera

We shot on the Blackmagic Ursa MiniPro as A camera in BRAW 0 (constant quality) on C-Fast cards. Timecode was provided by Tentacles.

B-Camera was a 4K Blackmagic Pocket for the gimbal, and C-Camera a 6K Pocket for the overhead shots.

Since this was not a studio shot, where you can remove a wall and back up, but on location, and we had a lot of scenes with 4-5 actors in the shot, I opted for a lovely set of Scorpiolens 2 x anamorphics.

They are really unique glass, since they don’t show the typical artifacts (CA, oval bokeh, distortion, flares) you usually get with anamorphics – it’s almost like shooting spherical lenses, but two times wider.

KLT Rental in Munich provided me with a set of 25mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 75mm. In Hindsight I could also have used a100mm a few times.

For more information, visit the website: Losgelassen-Film.com

Some scenes of Los(ge)lassen

Behind the scenes of Los(ge)lassen

More at: www.losgelassen-film.com