Day For Night shooting

[vimeo 35448689 w=500 h=281]

Day For Night shooting from Jeff Gatesman on Vimeo.

Day for night is a classic way of shooting a night scene without expensive and huge lighting setups. Instead you shoot during the day and use various techniques to create night in post. I made this image as a test for a short film I am planning to shoot soon. It is best viewed in full frame mode.

Still from original footage

Here is a still of what the original footage looked like before processing. The cool thing about using post techniques to create night is the virtually limitless palette you have to play with: you can create any kind of night look you want, from zombie apocalypse to warm and romantic.

Baby Shower – The Doritos Spot

Baby Shower from Jeff Gatesman on Vimeo.

This is the 30-second spot I made for Doritos’ Crash The Super Bowl competition. It did not make it into the top 5.

Now, I’m not going to say that whoever makes the choices over at Doritos has no sense of humor, or that they lack taste or vision, or that they are just down right terrible at making decisions. No, I’m not going to say any those things. I’m going to take the high road, and just say congratulations to the well-deserving filmmakers who produced the five spots chosen by those “decidors” over at Doritos.

I would also like to mention Jennifer Cobb and Laya Portillos who came up with the concept and wrote “Baby Shower”, and who are the two lovely stars of the spot. Without them I would probably have just done something with dogs.

Even if you’ve seen this on the Doritos site–it was highly compressed and the audio suffered from it. Here it is in High Def with a better sounding mix.