This past weekend, I was lucky enough to help out and go behind the scenes with Big City on a music video shoot. We were working with local Toronto talent, Scenario and KiKi SB. Let me tell you it wasn’t easy but it was a whole lot of fun and a great learning experience. For the video we were trying to get a Mental Institute feel, something like shutter island, and the large spaces, long hallways and old-fashioned freight elevators at Big City Studios provided that dark grimy atmosphere. Now the problem here, as any good photographer/videographer will tell you, was that “dark and grimy” isn’t quite the best place to be shooting in. And that’s where Big City’s wide variety of lights came in. We had various set-ups that illuminated all scenes brilliantly. For starters, during the elevator shots, we used two Big City 1200 LED’s on either side of our actors to bring the scene to life and one Big City 220 full frontal to add that significant glow found in many great music videos. It was a fairly simple set-up but the results were much better than you would get from most highly complex and expensive lighting sets.

The next scene was in the loooooong and dark hallway. Here, we shot the ladies dance sequences as well as a running/walking shot. Now things were getting a little trickier, the only available lighting was the overhead lamps that were each at least 5 ft apart. This was definitely not the best place to be shooting a trio dance group, especially when you’re going for that glamorous/flashy music video aesthetic. To make things worse there were no outlet sources all along the hallway, the only outlets to be found were at the beginning and very end of the hall, but we worked with what we had and our video came out looking stronger than ever. How did we solve the faulty lighting problems? Once again, Big City to the rescue! Two Big City 1200 LED’s were set at the front end of the hall, this time, with a Big City Ringlight to help our ladies really pop out at the audience. This set up was sufficient but there was something missing, the finishing touch, the cherry on top. We walked and walked and walked straight down to the end of the hall where there was a second outlet, we set up our largest light bank, the Big City 330 and, boy did that baby shine! Everyone was blown away by the effect of using the 330 at the very end of the hall, it resembled a window of beaming cool blue light.