After a close call a few months ago, Director Paul B Cummings and I had the opportunity to collaborate on another Adult Swim promo. You can watch our Bob’s Burger spot from last year here.
Paul has the distinction of helming the first official shoot with my ARRI Alexa 35! We really appreciated how the camera handled the contrast ratios of our outdoor shoot. We locked our location based on the creative calling for a greenhouse for Groot: a cool spot in Highland Park. Unfortunately, three days before the shoot, we needed more of an arboretum view.
To our good fortune, we found a quality spot on the campus of the original home. We thoroughly scoured the contoured grounds for something both production friendly and visually interesting. The latter proved much easier than the former. In the end, we sacrificed lighting with the hopes that the Alexa would pick up some of the slack.
My G&E team (lead by Team Bashet and Caleb Phillips respectively) battled a densely vegetated and steep hill just camera right of our actor. Large frames were out of the question and due to permitting issues we couldn’t fire up a generator for really big guns. For lighting continuity, we utilized a Creamsource VORTEX 8 on the key side and eventually landed an Aputure 1200D in the background for her backlight.
Freed from the constraints of the tiny greenhouse, we broke out my 4′ slider to give movement to a select few shots. On the flip side, losing the shelter of the greenhouse meant contending with obnoxious intermittent noises from a construction site down the hill. Our star, Elyse Mirto, handled what could’ve been a volatile situation with extreme grace. While we lost at least 2 hours waiting for the banging and drilling to subside, she happily powered through the dense script.
Taking the project through color correction in DaVinci Resolve demonstrated the strengths of the new ARRI sensor and I look forward to countless more hours on set with this wonderful tool. We’re all quite happy with how the 35 pairs with my Zeiss Super Speed prime lenses. Many thanks to Paul and Matt Marenyi for another invitation.
SUSAN: Elyse Mirto
Director: Paul B. Cummings
Producer: Matt Marenyi
Production Supervisor: Mike Machin
Commercial Coordinator: Jerome Marshall
1st AD: Jeff Cobb
Cinematographer: Dustin Pearlman
1st AC: Raquel Wajner
2nd AC: Joshua Allen
DIT: Emilio Pousa
Gaffer: Team Bashet
Key Grip: Caleb Phillips
Grip: Ian Pierson
Production Designer: Mark C. Davis, Jr.
Lead Man: Adam Boggs
Sound: Peter Beer
HMU: Haley O’neil
Wardrobe Stylist: Kerri Hennessy
Locations: Daniel Strebin
PAs: Tyler Hou, Lawrence Meeker, Joel Dishman,
Driver: Dello Bessabella
If you could study Grootology, would you? Any preference on your University? I’ll lobby Northwestern to add it to the language department.
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