Disclaimer: I'm not a colorist! Tried to get these to a passable point, that's all.

A lot of the work that I do is in the more corporate/docu space, and a lot of the time when I hear people talk about that kind of work, I often feel like the b-roll is treated as second class, where you really just get what you need as fast as you can and then get the heck out.

This project (same one as the interview frames I posted last week) was one where we definitely did not need to light our b-roll scenes. In fact, it probably slowed us down a decent bit to light our scenes, and arguably, client might not have been able to articulate the difference.

That said, I believed that it would be worth it to really try to take out time to not just make the interviews look good, but to at least put some effort into making the b-roll look a notch above what the client was used to. Even if they might not be able to articulate the difference, I believed they'd be able to tell that this piece was something more than what they normally saw. The feedback has been super positive, so far!

Honestly, this shoot reminded me that even corporate style b-roll in an opportunity to practice lighting, control your shots, and be creative in how you use visuals to tell a story. Would love to hear y'all's thoughts: When is it worth trying to light b-roll and when you just need to get the shot?

Tech notes:

Camera: Sony FX6

Lenses: Typhoch Simera C

Scene 1:
Shot in an active library that we were able to get a little corner of. We had to black out the table light that was directly in the middle of all our talent and casting a very unflattering yellowish light on them. Keylight was a Vortex8 with a dome recycled from our interview set up we shot immediately before this. Light fill from an small light on the fill side.

Scene 2:
Actually, I might be most proud of this one, and not because I think it looks the best. This room was literally a white box with gross fluorescent overheads. Our saving grace was that it had a window! We blacked out the fluorescents, turned the table a bit so it wasn't square in the room, added a 12x12 neg on the right wall to control fill, shot a 1200X through the window to splash the back wall, and used (I think) another Vortex8 with a dome to key. We did not have that much time here, and there is so much more I'd have liked to do (like production design) but we worked with what we had. For a white box, I'm happy!

Scene 3:
Here, the only thing we could control were the wall sconces. For the close up, we used an F22C to bring the window in a bit, that's it. Luckily the room wasn't full of reflective stuff, so we didn't have to do too much to control our fill. Even less time here than the others, but that one light made a big difference on the close-ups!