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LOVE SEX INDUSTRY

Jan Ehret is performing in the musicvideo 'LOVE SEX INDUSTRY' directed by Julia Patey

It should be dirty, it should be greasy, wild and industrial. The plan was shooting it t with one lens. I chose an old and beautiful wide angle Nikon 20mm f2 on a Canon 5D II. Before that project I never have shot with wide angle lenses, so I wanted to give it a try and the project seemed to be perfect for that.

Our location was an old, beautiful and fucked up industrial building. It was just perfect because it wasn't even necessary to hide the lamps, cables etc. A great benefit in order to shoot with such a wide lens. The budget was little and we decided to shoot the entire video with a very small crew. Director, actors, gaffer, electrician, DoP- that was it. Nearly everything was handheld, without a rig, just the camera with a lens. The focus was pulled by myself, directly on the lens. We planned shooting in a very improvised style, to get some extreme expressions and performances by the musician Jan Ehret and the other actors. Julia pushed them a lot to get some very hard stuff. Having such a flexible and small setup was such a great freedom and perfect for that project. The light was prepped before every scene with the help of my gaffer Malte Siepen and one electrician (Alexander Diamantstein).

The lighting concept consisted of just two colours, a strong orange (L777 Rust) and a strong cyan (L354 Special Steel Blue). We chose these colours to give some warmth to the hard and industrial style. We wanted to have a strong separation between for- and background and used the two colours for that. The light was mostly created by neontubes, Kinoflos, Par Cans (as backlight), Source 4s. For a more dreamy atmosphere we added fog to most of the scenes. To make the orange even more rich we sometimes added some reddish fill light from the top in the orange areas.

We all knew it would be super dirty and because of the 20mm lens I have to get very close to the actors so I decided to put a clear filter in front of the lens and smeared with an transparent lipstick on it. With a light source in frame the 'fat filter' created a strong glow around the highlights.

We shot on two cameras, a Canon 5D Mark II and Julia shot on a Canon 7D with a little longer lens, an old 28mm Nikon f2 lens. Both lenses gave the image a softer image and added more glow in the highlights.

Using strong colours with these cameras without an external recorder etc. is a hell of a thing. The range of tools we actually can use in postproduction are very limited because the material itself is already very compressed. To achieve the best result in postproduction we decided to do as much as possible on set and let it have a dirty look.

Thank you so much Julia & Jan and of course the team for such a great shoot!

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