On set with up and coming DoP Annika Summerson

LCA met up with up and coming DoP Annika Summerson on set at Cineco Studios, Brentford, while shooting the promo for Dog Is Dead - Two Devils directed by Prano Bailey-Bond. Annika tells us of the challenges she faced lighting the promo on a tight budget and with limited space.


"The lighting kit wasn't very exciting, mainly par cans and 650w fresnels, 2k fresnel and chimera on a boom arm for top lighting, a 5k fresnel for general fill when needed and a 4k HMI for the forest, we were on a pretty tight budget...

 

The forest itself was made of cardboard that had been ripped and roughed up to create the birch tree like texture but it also meant you couldn't really backlight them since they then got a strange glow that we decided didn't fit so the most difficult thing was lighting the 100 trees from the right angle in a fairly small studio.  It was a lot tighter then it looks.

And a five piece band that all needed to look pretty (which they of course were in real life), but sneaking beauty lights in for the wideshot was pretty tricky since there was no grid in the ceiling yet so everything had to go on the floor and be hidden behind other props.

The production designer Damien Creagh was pretty brilliant and clever I must say though, he basically made it all out of nothing, really minimal budget, and the girl coming up from under the bed was his contraption as well as when she sinks into the ground so he did the SFX as well together with John who owns cineco studios."