Still work for Kingpins Bowling contracted by Watson Creative. The concept was essentially bowlers on plexi glass and the camera shooting up at a low angle, which was a little daunting since you are shooting through fairly thick piece of plexiglass.
To feel confident about my approach, I built a 3D version of the stage and roughed in the lighting to make sure I hadn't missed anything that might hamper the shoot. I did a fair bit of previz work to plan this out and get an accurate budget.
One thing to note is that the shoes had to be composited in as that was a totally different lighting setup. I had to light those from the camera side which would have ruined the sculpted light I had going on the subjects. It also produced quite a bit of glare since there was a large piece of plexi between me and the subjects.
Here are the finalized images:
And here is the previz work I built out in order to bid on the project accurately. I ended up getting way more specific with the lighting in the end result, as real life is slightly more nuanced than a 3D render. I ended up double diffusing the frontal key light as it was picking up as a very specific specular in the bowling ball.
One thing that isn't super apparent looking at the renders, but that helped me on the shoot is draping the whole stage with duvetyne. Cutting all the incidental light created a perfect black box which meant no unwanted reflections. For that alone, I'm glad I built the previz so I came prepared with enough fabric.
The ceiling was a 20 x 20 Black Solid, which was the real nightmare. With a somewhat limited budget, the client hadn't booked a stage with suitable ceiling room, so a fair bit of lighting had to be taken down in order to get the 20x20 to height.
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