‘Nosotros’ is a fun, upbeat, latin band that calls New Mexico home. They came to NMFR to shoot their music video for their new song. They wanted it in the style of soul train. We shot it in the studio at SFCC. Directed by the band/Gene Mederos and DP’d by Diana Deaguinaga. I did the lighting and Zac Chacon was my key grip.

The execution: The band told us they were expecting 50+ extras to dance in their video plus the 10 person band on a stage. I knew right away space would be tight so we would need to rig everything from the grid. They were calling this dance club “latin underground” so they wanted club/dance lighting but also TV looking like Soul Train. To me this meant high key colored lighting but not flat and washed out. “This should be challenging and fun,” I thought.

We started by lighting the ‘dance floor’ area. Angelina hung a string of practicals that zigzagged across the set. This was 16 60w reveal globes dimmed to about 50% that would bring up the ambient but also play in the shot. We used 4 trombone hangers to get the lights low into the shot and keep them rigid.  Zac hang our custom made batten light which is a 4′ incandescent fixture, with 8 60w reveal globes, covered with full grid. I used this light because it’s longer than most lights so it covers a wider area without washing it. We needed at least two of these to cover the dance line but since we dont have 2 we used a Rifa 88 with an egg crate to light the middle back part of the line.

There was a moonflower LED light off of camera right to create some colored moving light. We also used an Arri L7-C on demo mode (rolls through its entire color spectrum) as a back light on the dancers. We had two source fours focused on opposite sides to light the disco ball.

Flanking the dance line were two gogo dancers on pedestals. I wanted a hot top light on them. We used source fours again for this. To bring down the intensity and get to a f-4, I used ND gel on them.

Not pictured in the diagram is a 1k baby led with 216 that is lighting the front of the dance line, closest to camera.

To light the band on stage I used 500w 6″fresnels on trombones on each side of the stage to side light them. The one on camera right had yellow gel and the one on the left had red. To key the band was a kino image 47 in the grid just above them. The backlight was another 500w fresnel. Mounted on the front of the stage was two par 32 lights with red and blue gel. The first couple of takes we used the fog machine to bring out all the beams of light but it was causing bad reflections and flares for camera so we cut it. Behind the stage were two LED DJ lights supplied by Nosotros.

I was quite happy with the results from this shoot. I wasn’t sure if we could pull off the TV high key look without being flat and washing out all the colored lights but it looked real good. The egg crate on the Rifa kept the light right in the middle and shaping the other lights with barn doors helped to keep the light focused on its target. The final product looks similar to soul train, the dancers are lit well and there is lots of color. Tell me what you think.