Nightshade

The brief was a launch film for an evening fragrance. The obvious version is a dark room and a lot of smoke. We went the other way and shot outside, at night, in a garden.

Approach

Everything is lit by one practical — a bulb on a stand, moved by hand between setups. No fill, no bounce, nothing to lift the shadows. The falloff does the work, and because the source moves, the same plant reads differently in every shot.

Shot at f1.4 throughout, which at that distance leaves perhaps two centimetres in focus. Roughly a third of the takes were unusable. The ones that worked have a specificity you cannot get by stopping down and fixing it later.

On location

A crew of three in a walled garden outside Paris, four nights, starting an hour after sunset and finishing when the dew made the lens unusable. The bottle appears at ninety seconds and is on screen for eleven of the film's hundred and forty.

Delivery

A two-minute-twenty film, three cutdowns, and a set of stills pulled from the master. The client asked for a version with the product earlier. We cut it, watched both, and they kept the original.