Taylor Swift - Wildest Dreams - Shot on RED WEAPON by Christopher Probst

[Christopher Probst]

I don't have as much bts shots but I'll see what I can do after I get back from Star Wars...

 

[Nick Morrison]

I don't have as much bts shots but I'll see what I can do after I get back from Star Wars...

Cool....

 

[Antony Newman]

The 'Black and White' section looked simply beautiful.

AJ

 

[Scot Yount]

I don't have as much bts shots but I'll see what I can do after I get back from Star Wars...

Much appreciated.

 

[Christopher Probst]

Let's see... it's been a few months but here's a breakdown of Wildest Dreams...


Part 1: Prep

I always start a project with an idea of how I want the image to look and then devise how to go about achieving that look. This project was a “period” piece harkening back to old school, classic Hollywood era of the 40s-50s… In this case, we cast Taylor as a movie star making a safari picture like African Queen. She’s having a heated, tumultuous affair with her leading man, Scott Eastwood (Clint’s son) but doesn’t know he’s married. All’s steamy on location, but when they get back to the states, reality sets in and the dream is over. She’s left alone.

We didn’t want to go overly gauzy with filters and didn’t want to shoot black and white either. We wanted something slightly reminiscent of that era, but still modern at the same time. For me that was going to be achieved in the lighting and lens choices. I started by playing with lens options that would give me a certain contrast and flare I was looking for.

Here I’m testing some lens choices… I had no assistant on hand so I stood in for myself and photographed a 17” monitor I had in front of me..

So even with 1 just light I've affecting the image and contrast as I want.

Next, I knew I wanted a LITTLE diffusion but I didn't want to have filters in front of the lens for the whole shoot. I ended up selecting the OLPF versions instead to build that look in-camera. Problem was, Kipper Tie's OLPFs were made for Epic Dragons, NOT Weapons at the time and there are differences in the product. First off, The old Epic OLPFs have the color science layers AS WELL AS the birefringent quartz that is the “actual” Optical Low Pass portion of the filter. On Weapon, The Quartz is now mounted closer to the sensor and the actual swappable glass is only the color science layers… This means if mounting Epic OLPFs on a Weapon, that’s DOUBLE quartz… I needed to test if that was going to really fuck up my image as it was possible if the quartz matrix was misaligned with the other, I could get a blurry mushy blob of an image…

Here’s a pic from the night before the shoot of me trying to suss this situation out!

 

[Christopher Probst]

Part 2: Exteriors

We shot our “Africa” out in Tejon Ranch in the high desert about an hour north of Los Angeles.

Here's a panorama of Tejon where we shot... There was a big tree just to the right of the trucks in this shot were we ended up staging a fair amount of the scenes...

For all of the exterior work we ended up selecting the STH OLPF with the Carbon 1 diffusion on it. A lot of these scenes were a careful balance of daylight and augmenting/controlling the sun on the actors.

Shooting these scenes was more about plotting the time of day to shoot which angles, how to control the daylight we did use and art directing the frames with period film gear and nature. And damn if Scott doesn't look a lot like his father back in the Spaghetti Western days!

This shot of them kissing was one of several Ronin shots we did in the video. Was much quicker than laying track and I like being able to have control of the timing of the move holding the camera in hand.

Aerial shots were achieved in actual Africa with photo doubles, while closeup work was done poor-man's process at Tejon Ranch during our 1-day there.

 

[Christopher Probst]

Part 3 - Universal:

The 2nd shoot day was done on stage and the backlot at Universal Studios.

The first scene there was on a soundstage where the fictitious movie has moved indoors to complete the shooting of the film... Our film is ostensibly shooting in the 1950s, so we had tons of period lights and props to sell the gag.

Moving on to the backlot, we staged a big movie premiere and did a lot of crowd duplication...

Any chance I get, I'm always a fan of getting big vintage Kliege lights out... These shots are all on Ronin and with a motion Mount to contend with the strobe flashes... was painful accounting for the stop and a third loss, but that'swhat you gotta do... THEN Joseph asked to shoot slow mo...!!

 

[Scot Yount]

Let's see... it's been a few months but here's a breakdown of Wildest Dreams...

Thanks Chris, I really appreciate it. I know others do too.

 

[Nick Morrison]

Loving this! Thanks so much!!

 

[Christopher Probst]

Gotta run and do some camera tests but will finish up tonight...

 

[Jake Wilganowski]

Mr Probst this stuff is great for us camera nerds, thanks

 

[John Marchant]

Thanks for sharing Christopher

 

[Christopher Probst]

BTS Pics added on page 7... Enjoy folks.

 

[Scot Yount]

Thanks again Chris. I learn more here than anywhere else.

 

[Matt Bai]

Stills are gorgeous. But I was under the impression (some of) this was filmed in 8k?

 

[Christopher Probst]

Nope, just standard 6K Weapons.

 

[Nick Morrison]

Nope, just standard 6K Weapons.

Loved that you shot 48fps @5:1! Wow!!

Mangesium can only do 7:1...

And thanks for all the BTS info...very inspring!

And loved learning about intricacies of the OLPFs!

Happy Holidays!
Best

 

[Jeff McCoy]

Chris, your recent BTS posts are great. Its very generous to give away such detailed creative and technical information in your limited spare time. These types of posts are a rare look behind the camera of some of the coolest projects being shot. I think I speak for many when I say they are truly appreciated by the Reduser community. Thank you!

 

[Kenny Mosher]

Thanks for sharing the BTS pics and info Chris! Rock on

 

[Jeff McCoy]

What lenses did he rock on this? Looks amazing Christopher.

So this is still the big mystery...
What are these lenses, where can I get them and how much do they cost?
This video certainly has a very unique look.