Coca-Cola: Santa

The brief

In 2023 I shot a Santa campaign for Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages. Grit Productions produced it. The set was a 40 by 17 foot LED wall stage, and the frames show a snow set with a red truck, a sleigh, and a snowy world on the wall behind them.

My role

I was the director of photography. Grit Productions produced the spot, and I ran the camera and lighting side of it. My general view of lighting is that on a stage the lighting control is the whole job, and this was the clearest example of that.

How we shot it

We had three production days: pre-light, rehearsal, and production. On a stage like this, the LED wall carries the world, and the light on the talent and the product has to read as part of the same room.

I lit it with fifteen Aputure 600Xs through a 20 by 20 Magic Cloth overhead, which gave a big soft top light. On the stage floor I added two 12 by 12 half-grid frames with Aputure 1200Ds. I shot on two RED Komodos.

The frames show what the day produced: a laughing Santa in close-up against the snowy wall, three Santas on the snow set with the red truck and sleigh, Santa in the truck holding up a glass Coca-Cola bottle, Santa in the sleigh reading a long scroll as snow falls, Santa running through the snow past candy canes and the red truck, and Santa throwing both arms up in falling snow, shot from below.

Lighting a full stage is the clearest case for hiring a DP who shapes the light on purpose, as I wrote on my blog.

The result

The spot is embedded on the page. Grit Productions produced it for Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages, and I shot it as the DP. The same setup, down to the fifteen 600Xs and the 20 by 20 overhead, is the example I use on my Dallas cinematographer page for how I run a camera department on a stage.