Monday arrived and the shoot was one day away. The set stylist arrived at the studio and started his magic. The assistants went and picked up all of the rental equipment as well as all of our in-house equipment and we made several trips over to the studio to load in. A better part of the morning was simply organizing everything and setting up the cameras and computers to make sure all was functioning. We set up some preliminary lights and assessed the situation and decided on renting a few more items to fill out our arsenal.

After lunch and another run to pick up the additional rental items we started in earnest on pre-lighting. The individual portraits we would do were fairly straight forward as far as the set was concerned. We would simply be shooting them against a simple wall flat that was to be of the same material as the larger set. We wanted to have this be separate from the large set so as to be able to light each set independently and be able to start shooting while the set stylist was still finishing the main set. We had a tripod on the portrait set and a studio stand for the main set, both with quick release heads so that we could move the camera back and forth between the sets and always be able to snap right back into the exact position.

Above is the Portrait Set-Up with the larger set in the background. Again, these were simply going to be head and shoulder shots so we only needed a small wall segment for them to stand in front of.

Once we had the portrait set dialed in we moved over to the main set which was still very much in progress. We set the camera and and a few of the main set pieces and did some general lighting and around 6pm had to get out of the stylists way so that he and his crew could finish.

There was still a lot of work to do before we started shooting, so tomorrow would be an early start.