Hollywood Red Carpets
by Gordon Lake
I’ve only been shooting Red Carpets for two years but it doesn’t take long to learn the system of a Studio film Red Carpet, and it is a system. Same lighting company, same crews, same setups and same protocols. But very different shooting challenges.
For this case study I chose 3 premieres that were shot at the same location in Westwood but each event forced us to deal with issues unique to that event.
For the Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett film ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ ¾ of a city block was covered under a tent which meant we had to place our jib under the canopy and stage it between supporting wires which severely limited its movement.
The tent also meant that the lights that are normally high in open air had to be lowered in the tent, so I had to shoot all the interviews with banks of lights as my backdrop.
The night before the Twilight Premiere I happened to be leaving a client meeting in Westwood and I walked by the Mann theater about 10pm and saw hundreds of teenage girls camped out on the sidewalk with parents standing by in the back of their cars as if some massive tailgate party was about to get under way.
It should have dawned on me that I might want to bring earplugs to the Premiere because these girls were camped out to get bracelets that would allow them to attend the Red Carpet the next night.
The next day we began setting up at 3pm for a 6:30pm live broadcast. More than a thousand girls begin screaming around 5:30pm even though no one would hit the Red Carpet for another hour, and they didn’t stop until it was over sometime after 7:30pm.
The problem was that you couldn’t hear anything. I couldn’t hear the Host or the Celebrities or anything they were saying in the truck.
An interesting fact I found out later was that thousands had put the Live Broadcast Widget on their MySpace and FaceBook pages which meant there were screaming teenage girls all over the planet that night.
‘Marley and Me’ was a cool Red Carpet and the interview with Jennifer Aniston was straight forward. The challenge was the interview with the kid stars and Marley the dog which you had to drop to your knees to get the right shot.
To the left of me was Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood and others so I could watch the Marley interviews before he got to us.
He would lick the Host’s face, chew on the microphone, lick the camera lens and other mischief, so I was determined not to be a Marley victim because we were broadcasting live and wouldn’t have the luxury of editing out any mishaps. Fortunately the clip below is edited
