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

[Manfred Lopez]

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!

Thank you so much for this! Now only one question remains... How did you get the lion to stand still... Just kidding. About those custom lenses?