Dragged to the Musicals
Background
I was on holiday when I got the call “Do you want to shoot an intro to a drag musical?”. Yes please! The client was D3 Productions, ran by Nathan and Rob. I have known them both for over 10-15 years! They are fantastic people, putting on some incredible shows both Nationally and Internationally!
Concept
Nathan had a concept of seeing our ‘leading lady’, Divina De Campo, in the dressing room ahead of her performance on stage, just getting the finishing touches of makeup and hair done! As she steps off to go on stage she realises she’s forgotten her ‘boobs’!
The short intro to the musical performance was designed to get the crowd warmed up and provide some humour to get everybody relaxed!
Shoot
We had a day filming with Divina, we looked at various options for filming location but we settled on shooting this in the corner of a boardroom! It surprising what you can do with some black drape and props! If we had shot ‘backstage’ at a theatre we’d have been boxed into what they had available for us, and if we’d gone to a film studios the cost would have been significantly more with little more flexibility than we had!
First off we setup the dressing table, mirror and camera to decide where everything need to land to make this work!
Once we locked in the angle, which was going to track forwards and backwards on my track and dolly system, we began to dress the background and foreground. Making use of lots of elaborate dresses worked really well, along with, as I mentioned before, black drape!
We then set a small cabinet in the foreground with some props to give it a closed in, backstage feel.
I lit the spot using firstly the lights on the mirror, set to 3200K. I then supplemented this with a LED flex panel overhead to give us a little more exposure and modelling! I added a 650W Fresnel (with 1/2 CTO) on the far side of Divina to give her a hair light and further to this a small Dedolight (with 1/2 CTO) to rake her dresses on the rail.
We then used a fog machine to add some atmosphere to the space. It’s always surprising how much a little atmosphere turns something from flat looking to 3D!
We then moved into the hallway for the big reveal, designed to look like a dressing room door! Again I made use of the LED flex light overhead along with the Dedolight to rake the door sign as it opens
Post Production
Post production was straight forward, we shot everything in 50p UHD sLog3 so we had lots of flexibility to speed ramp, re-frame and colour grade.
The sequence almost cut itself! With some clever sound effect, and layering the dialogue along with the music beats, offered a quirky little intro piece!
Conclusion
It was a great project to be involved with! I always enjoy doing something a bit different and unusual, and certainly pull a lot from my days shooting short films and music videos on project like this, where we are really trying to make ‘something out of nothing!’ as it were!
