Tell us about the general lighting requirements?

We had to light the set in a late evening/night-time style. My gaffer Giray Gergin is a true artist. We rigged a large amount of tungsten units on an above hanging truss grid system. Various softboxes were applied as well. They were equipped with SkyPanels and they were managed with a control board. We were able to change the height and angle and the length of the curtains of each softbox independently. The outside of our set was pre-rigged with large, open face tungsten units to light the backdrop evenly. For the night scene, we used cooler soft sky bounce through the windows, and Giray even applied small LED punctual fixtures to replicate urban street lights.            

This commercial used a number of different setups. Could you explain a bit about them?

We used the same studio for our motion-control, time-lapse, and high-speed setups because we wanted to shoot constantly all 4 main areas of action. The grips pulled up large curtains to divide the studio space. One setup was a glass oven which we could light from outside. There we shot moving time-lapse of the process of baking various dishes. Due to the single frame exposure, the units were very small, a bunch of 300W Fresnels and a SkyPanel S60-C for a soft backlight did the job.

Lighting the high-speed setup was a completely different number. We used various M90’s and M40’s with the ARRI high speed ballasts and their AutoScan Mode. Because of the heat sources, we, of course, had to use metal flags, otherwise they would have been burned. Director Ali Taner Baltaci and I were constantly switching from one setup to another, shooting, tweaking shots, or lighting new setups. Ali Taner was missing some reaction shots, so we called in a second camera unit to continuously concentrate on the celebrities’ reactions.