A 16mm lens means you cannot hide a light stand
Four visual worlds, the same ten shots repeated in each, one Steadicam day. Shooting that wide meant every unit had to live outside the set, which decided the entire lighting plan.
Watch on YouTubeKai-Yan Lai shot "Pause" for director Matt Chandler on 16mm Cooke S4 primes throughout. The focal length is the whole constraint:
Framing on a 16mm lens meant that everything would be exposed to my frame and therefore having lights on stands in the set would be a no-go and out of my control. It wasn't like we had the budget for a flame artist…
Lighting LED Vortex 8s doing about 90% of it, plus Astera Titan tubes, Luna bulbs, heavy haze
Windows taped with quarter diffusion, blackout-tented
Special UV/fluorescent tubes in a four-bank Kino housing on a mega boom
Second world bare LED torch rigged above the lens; V8s outside at 1%, 7000K +10CC
Grade reference Fuji Eterna 250T, and over-bleached expired Kodak Vision2 5218
The structure
We broke the video down into 10 core shots, repeated across each world. It was highly ambitious, but seeing the animatic gave us confidence it would pay off.
Repeating an identical shot list across four looks is the cheapest possible way to make a video feel large: the audience reads the variation, not the repetition. It only works if it is pre-visualised, and the whole thing was cut as an animatic first.
A planned robot arm was dropped for time and programming reasons and replaced by a full day in the Steadicam rig.
Crew named: Jayy Gomez (Steadicam), Scott Youlden (gaffer), Isis Clunie (movement director and lead dancer), Jessica Lee (1st AD), Mara Ciorba (senior colourist, Harbor Picture Company). Lighting from Glo Film Lighting, lenses from One Stop Films, for Marshall Records.
Budget and crew size: not stated.
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