"PLAY" a 60-second commercial for the Virginia Lottery

My very first post! These are my experiences traveling to Richmond, Virginia with the creative teams at Fable and Alice Blue to shoot a regional commercial spot for the Virginia Lottery.

The Back Story

About a year before this project, I worked on a commercial in Orlando, FL with a creative agency named Alice Blue. We had a few challenges on the project but everything went really smoothly and I think both the team at Alice, and myself really enjoyed the collaboration. An interesting note is Alice Blue is based in Richmond, VA just an hour or so from where I was born and raised! Id kept in touch with their creative director David Waraksa and eventually they reached out to me regarding a new project. The Virginia Lottery was going through a re-branding stage and as part of it they wanted to shoot a 60 second commercial spot that'd play throughout the state. The creative agency wanted to know that I had experience working on spots with significant VFX elements, I also had to interview with the director duo, Grady Hall & Mark Kudsi. I submitted my commercial for Verizon 5G and Tua Tagovailoa, it features a VFX version of an AR Hologram that interacts with Tua. I also sent my music video with Pitbull and Arash "Goalie", it was almost completely VFX driven as every shot has either a CG element. The team felt Id be a good fit and they selected me to shoot the project for them!

The Concept

The spot is to feel super high energy with bright, full lighting, and colorful sets. The commercial would be set to fast paced music with no voice over narration. We will see multiple vignettes of the word PLAY on screen, displayed in a multitude of different ways like food on a grill or clouds in the sky. The majority of shooting would take place in a studio setting with one or two exteriors.

The Execution

We filmed at BES Studios in Richmond, VA. They had enough space of our large white cyc set up as well as a variety of small rooms and areas for the selection of smaller vignettes we shot, usually based on color, so one set might be all red while the next was all green, then so on and so forth. Grady and Mark wanted the project to feel like a high production value shoot that was polished and well done, this influenced my choice for camera and lensing. I knew we would have a really tight schedule so I had us carry a zoom lens as well. We chose the Arri Alexa 35 and Arri Signature Primes for filming, with a Fujinon 19-90 Cabrio in case we get into a pinch, we shot 4.6K Open Gate. A trick I love is shooting in Open Gate in order to facilitate filming multiple aspect ratios, the Open Gate setting means every single pixel available on the cameras sensor is being used. Being that the sensor is 27.99mm x 19.22mm you get an image thats more square than 16x9 allowing you to make room for two deliverable aspect ratios, for this shoot we did 16x9 and 9x16 for social. Skin tone rendition is huge for me, I find myself fighting for accurate and flattering skin tones often, this is a strength of the Arri Signatures. The signatures are also great for highlight and shadow retention, which is very appealing to me when im on a tight shooting schedule and cant fine tune every lighting situation and every exposure.

The shoot went off virtually without a hitch, we got every shot on our boards and the client was elated. I think something I re-learned on this job was just how crucial it can be to have an experienced 1st AD. We shot approximately a dozen set ups a day while working on 10 hour days, not 12. David "Goldie" Goldstein ran a tight ship all the while being our tireless positive energy, what a blessing he and this shoot were!