The Seven Hats
“Last January, I went to Denver with Mike Jacobs and the guys from Strike Anywhere to document the annual livestock show there. It was a pretty amazing experience where you got to see the very best cattle and bulls in America being showcased and then auctioned off to a bunch of ranchers for breeding. It was a really cool documentary."
“While we were shooting, one of the local PAs onset, started to talk about this local performance group ‘The Seven Hats’. By that night, they had organized the band and a location for us to shoot at, the very next day before we flew back to LA. We finished up at the sale yards and headed over to the location to meet the group by midday. We had only three hours to shoot this thing before we had to fly back to LA, so it was all pretty ‘spur of the moment’ stuff.”
“The local crew found us this amazing old attic full of stuff, so we didn’t really need any art direction because all of the props were already there! The only problem was that my package for the documentary at the sale yards, didn’t include any lights, and here we were shooting in an attic.”
“The local crew finally found me a 3’x4’ hydroponic fluorescent grow light! I had never shot with an agricultural grow light before, so I didn’t know what we would get. It did give off some green spikes which we fixed with a quick grade, but other than that, it was surprisingly good. The lead singer had this beautiful porcelain look to her skin, so I think we were pretty lucky that the light, actually worked out for her.”
“I hung the grow light up from the beams in the attic and then added some christmas lights as practicalness for balance. I think we were all really surprised how good it look using the window in the background for natural light.”
“For most of this shoot, it was all about finding really nice frames within the space. There were six setups in total, so it wasn’t very difficult to do this in under 3 hours. The group was fantastic, and after a glass or two of red wine they launched into their performance. I really liked her performance a lot, and shooting her close up was brilliant because she has all of these wonderfully subtle looks.”
“As I said, all I had was the gear that I needed for the sale yards. The package for that shoot included a Red Epic and one of my favorite lenses, a Cooke 20-60mm which has this really nice softness to it. I really love using this lens because it has these really cool rainbow flares. That wasn’t really apparent in this piece, but it worked really well for the documentary we’d been shooting that morning. Although, this lens did pick up some really nice texture from the window in the attic on this piece.”
“I shot all of this piece hand held on the EasyRig with some slow zooms. I was shooting somewhere between 60 fpsec and 96 fpsec on the Epic. It was pretty easy shooting this way off the EasyRig, and the slowmo certainly helped to give the whole thing a different sense of motion to the scenes.”
“Well, we got to the location by noon, had the shoot finished by 3pm, and we were all on a flight back to LA by 6pm! Not a bad shoot for something that we decided to do at the very last minute. When the guys at Strike Anywhere decide to do something, then it really could be anywhere and at any time. It was great fun shoot and I loved every minute.”
