The Turkish Arm

I spent the week in Istanbul shooting a commercial, involving a mix of night exteriors and interiors, this time shooting on an Alexa Plus with Master primes and a filter combo of 1/2 Classic Soft and 1/4 BPM, with a Tobacco 1 used for interiors. Everything was shot at T1.3 or close to it to both take advantage of all the available city light, and to work with a very narrow plane of focus. I worked exclusively with a kinoflo package for the exteriors, and added a single Octodome Dedolight for the interiors. Night exteriors were lit with a combo of several Kino Flatheads and 4 bank's and our interiors used the same package with the addition of the octodome as a keylight.
It's always interesting working in a country where you dont speak the language - it's amazing that with a good crew you can still communicate visual ideas and create wonderful work. The local crew I had was wonderful and had a lot of inventive approaches to solving logistical problems some of which I'll continue to use myself! Most of our night exterior work involved a combination of tracking vehicle and chase car work and I got to try out a new remote head system called the Thoma Head, mounted on a fixed arm on the chase car, which I'm now affectionately refering to as the Turkish arm:-)