Just finished up a wine commercial. It’s a spot that combines comedic performances by actors in a restaurant and serious shots of the wine.
I shot the restaurant portions with a set of LOMO Anamorphics, shooting 5K Anamorphic mode on the RED EPIC. Set guidelines for 16×9, knowing that we’d do a center crop in post. Technically, this approach loses resolution, but when you’re starting at 5K for a 1080p finish, you have lots of leeway to work with. The end result is an image that fits inside a viewer’s HD TV screen without letter boxing, but you still get the great organic characteristics of these lenses.
For the product shots I shot both 240fps and 360fps for the actual pouring of the wine. I wanted to shoot at a T5.6 to hold focus throughout the glass, so we needed a lot of light. We lit the glass with a large soft top light, plus the background was lit to full white, providing ample backlight coming through the glass and liquid. Had one additional light source coming through a frame of 216 diffusion from camera left, and then brought in negative fill from underneath and just behind the glass on both sides. We could see the black in the shape of the glass, bringing more of a three dimensional appearance to the glass:
Finally we had a product shot of the bottle itself. Art department dressed the table with grapes, cheese and bread. They also built a simple set with an antique glass window to go behind the wine. I used a fog machine to catch a tiny beam of light behind the wine glasses to create done additional seperation between the wine and the background.
