CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Shooting Inside A Mini Cooper With RoscoLED Tape

Rosco Spectrum: Cinematographer Christopher Lew recently shot a spec ad for Mini Cooper. The ad called for an overnight, all exterior location shoot of different colored Mini Coopers driving through the Toronto city streets. Because it was shot at night and the Mini Cooper is an ultra-compact car – Chris needed an ultra-compact lighting kit. The RoscoLED Tape Pro Gaffer Kit was his solution.

5 comments:

Alex Talbot said...

I found this article really enthralling, despite how simple it was. The article is clearly written as a product promotion--as it is on Rosco's website selling a product they sell, but it actually did a good job selling the product. Clearly, it's a very simple piece of equipment-but it seemed, at least from the examples that they gave in the article, the product is clearly very effective and simple. And the final product it seemed turned out well. Personally, I find these small engineering challenges very exciting and enjoyable. Even though this is a really simple fix, it turned out well, and at least from what I could tell, it was cheap, simple, and effective. That's one of the things I really like about entertainment work, especially in the lighting--small challenges such as that that require a bit of work and research to follow through on. I'd like to read more articles from Rosco, and see what other things people are doing with their products.

Re said...

This article is the epitome of short and sweet. It’s broken up into 5 sections with 3-5 sentences in each with pictures dividing the sections. Also, Lew doesn’t go into much depth about the product. The article basically says that the lights are easy to install, very bright, have good exposure, and are colored well. I understand that this article is an advertising for The RoscoLED Tape Pro Gaffer Kit, but it still could have given more information. More information definitely could have been put into this article to help people decide if this is the right product for the job and how it works. Nevertheless, it is an advertisement. I believe that a product review would have been more interesting and more helpful for the reader, but I do understand the Rosco is not going to say anything negative about their own product of their website. Despite the problems with the article, the lighting advertisement does allow you to easily see into the car and makes everyone look very good.

Rebecca Meckler said...

This article is the epitome of short and sweet. It’s broken up into 5 sections with 3-5 sentences in each with pictures dividing the sections. Also, Lew doesn’t go into much depth about the product. The article basically says that the lights are easy to install, very bright, have good exposure, and are colored well. I understand that this article is an advertising for The RoscoLED Tape Pro Gaffer Kit, but it still could have given more information. More information definitely could have been put into this article to help people decide if this is the right product for the job and how it works. Nevertheless, it is an advertisement. I believe that a product review would have been more interesting and more helpful for the reader, but I do understand the Rosco is not going to say anything negative about their own product of their website. Despite the problems with the article, the lighting advertisement does allow you to easily see into the car and makes everyone look very good.

Unknown said...

Every time I hear the words “LED” and “tape” in the same sentence, I cringe. I just think about a community theater production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” where the guy playing Jesus (who is a real estate agent by day, savior of the people by night) steps on led tape on the floor and crunches all the lights with his rock and roll platform heels so you have a holey (pun intended) strip of red light on the floor. Not that I’ve seen that happen before…

Anyways, this was obviously a clever idea. LED tape may not be hardy or powerful, but it does come in handy for very specific uses. The effect of giving faces a midnight glow in a small, confined, moving vehicle called for a very niche product and LED tape did that job.

Also, I’d just like to point out that you can’t trust anything you read on the internet nowadays because pretty much everything is sponsored, including this (obviously).

Ali Whyte said...

I'm always careful of clearly sponsored articles or those aimed at the specific purpose of getting you to buy a certain product or service, but I think this one was actually pretty well done (and convincing). I have had some experiences (and failures) with LED tape so I know that it's not great for everything, but this seems like a situation in which it would actually be one of, if not the only, real solution to a problem. I think this was a really smart choice and the end product actually looks really good. I think in such a small space and with limited access to power sources, this was a pretty genius idea, especially because of it's ability to be transferred quickly and easily saving time and money. Also, when I think of LEDs, I get this cold image in my head of washed out skin tones and super brightness, so I liked that the different colour temperatures were mentioned, and how they talked about the ability to dim the fixtures.