BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL

DP Billy Abbott reveals how a custom mirror-ball rig, 400 FPS slow-motion and full-LED lighting shaped the Bailey Lanes music video ”Little Bit Brighter”—a tender story of grief, dance and redemption. 

Film school has been my education in a different way to others. Reflecting upon my initial career as an educator, nothing prepares you more for storytelling than being invested in the 100s of lives passing through your doors, so this music video centred upon a foundational moment in someone’s life appealed to me greatly.  

Director Charlotte Meling enjoys the human stories that pass many of us by; in this she wanted to tell the story of one moment that changes the course for a grief-stricken father and his talented-dancer daughter. We wanted to lend a different look to a ballet-focused video and, as opposed to this being a love letter to dance, looked to ground this in reality with texture and emotive beats hit by Natascha Mair and her ‘younger self’ Sienna Suter.  

Steadicam felt like the best motivation tool for this approach, it’s organic and requires human precision – it carries weight without perfection. Working with Steadicam operator Ben Thomas, we choreographed key sequences and left time on each day for moments of inspiration.

Moving quickly and often due to multiple locations, child performance hours and supporting artists, I enjoyed the instinctive nature of decision-making that these scenarios often thrust upon us as artists. It was fantastic to work with such a performer in Natascha, a former principal ballerina for English National Ballet (and stunt-trained, too!), who could bring nuance to calmer moments in addition to providing context on how a particular ballet piece could represent the storyline best.  

Light work and mirror moves

In a perpetual battle with myself to consider what is ostentatious in lighting when shooting music videos, we struck the balance between a documentary-esque observational approach with stylistic moments to celebrate the story. I knew I wanted there to be a visible presence of light, often not directly interacting with our characters, to play on the idea of not being seen. I worked with gaffer Alex Cullen to design lighting using entirely LED fixtures which helped us move faster, more efficiently, and with a leaner crew.  

To emulate a celebratory ‘on-stage’ moment, I’d been toying with the idea of shooting in slow motion but creating a dappled lighting effect at a fast speed to vary our concept of theatre. This was born from the idea of life (or light, in this case) passing you by while you appreciate the moments we so often take for granted.  

Technical lead at Window Zebra Media , Sam Kemp, custom-rigged a mirror ball to spin 25x its usual speed. In our testing the torque of this construction was really quite something, and it went in for another round of reinforcements. To get a usable stop on our intended FPS (400), Nanlux provided a 5000b via ProLight Direct, which we fitted with a custom snoot to ensure our beam angle was narrower than the mirror ball’s diameter. If it were larger, the relative spread of reflections rendered the effect obsolete.  

This was the most difficult lighting set-up to refine and my A-plan of using a softer key quite quickly went out the window due to the required angles of the mirror ball relative to the position of other fixtures. Rather than constructing a flag fortress in a tight timeframe, we moved to plan B by using hard lights to backlight and bounce. We backlit Natascha with two Nanlux 2400Bs, and bounced back fill with an 8×2 Poly.  

Glass act

We shot the majority of the promo on an Alexa Mini LF with Cooke Panchro/i Classic FF lenses, which provide an organic, textured palette with pleasing skin tones that are a sure-fire way to create warm naturalism. The large-format sensor was mandatory for our approach of needing wider angles in tight locations and delivering in 2.39:1, without which we could not have celebrated some of the amazing locations, even using a Laowa 12mm at times to create a wider-world perspective in smaller spaces.  

I paired an FX6 with older Soviet glass for the younger protagonist’s exterior scenes – a Helios 44-M and MC-MIR 20mm – to create a softer, more organic look and separate Sienna from the world around her in a more blatant way. 

I sought to give each location a distinct look and feel, and this was benefitted by working with colourist Nielsan Bohl at Selected Works; we capped the highlights and invested in each scene’s palette to bring out colour contrast and add tasteful bloom and halation to the black and white work.    

There’s no doubt that this is a densely populated music video… multi-location, custom-rigged mirror-balls, artist sync, a dozen supporting artists, child performance and three main cast. It’s the type of video a label with a new artist or a prod-co would usually very quickly raise eyebrows at on such a small budget, but the production team at Window Zebra were on board to make this as dynamic as possible. There’s real joy in the level of ambition we were able to achieve with the can-do attitude of so many people who came out to support it, and hopefully some proof in the pudding that these things can be done.   

Building a crew of trusted compatriots that each elevate the meaning of a story through their own contributions is, I feel, self-actualisation as a cinematographer. We all work towards it. I felt lucky to bring the vision for “Little Bit Brighter” to life. It was remarkable to see the cast and crew surrounding this project invest in the meaning of the story and bring their own energy.