Shooting HAVS "Undecided"
- Eric Peters
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
One figure on the floor, one light overhead, and everything past the edge of it gone.
The board Nicole built was specific about texture before it was specific about anything else. Jorja Smith's "Price Of It All" set the colour, deep saturated single-hue frames where the light source sits right in shot and the rest of the room gives up. Tinashe's "Uh Huh" was the other pole, cooler and more controlled, a reference for how still a frame can stay while a body works hard inside it. Between those two you have the whole video: cool and composed for the dance, hot and close for the wrap.
The wardrobe reference was a mesh bodysuit lit by a single hard pool on a dark floor, which is really a lighting note wearing a costume note's clothes. Anything with open texture on the skin needs a hard source to read at all; diffuse it and mesh turns into a grey smear. That reference is the reason the overhead stayed bare.
For the wrap itself the board pulled in a red-lit figure behind sheeting, and a blue-lit body half buried in fabric under falling particles. Two different arguments for the same idea, that the material between the camera and the person is the subject, not an obstacle in front of it.
The note on the board was to sprinkle wrap into early frames as foreshadow and let it take over later, which is exactly how it plays.
One reference came with a caveat: a saran wrap look we wanted for the ending, minus the blood that was all over the original. Worth mentioning because it's the normal state of a moodboard. You are almost never taking a whole image. You are taking one property off it and leaving the rest.
The room
We shot at Yoga Public, 280 Fort St. The building opened in 1976 as the Carleton Club, a Smith Carter design in brown brick with angled slate skylights over the main volume. The room we used has none of that character. Drop ceiling, acoustic tile, supply vents, a white curtain running the length of the back wall, laminate floor. On paper it is the least cinematic room in the building.
That turned out to be the point. A room with no features is a room you can subtract from. We killed everything, hung a single hard source high and centre, and let the rest fall to black. The curtain reads as a wall of vertical texture in the wides and vanishes completely in the tighter work. The floor did the rest, kicking a hard specular path back up the middle of frame and raking every shadow straight toward camera. In the three-dancer wide, the shadows are doing as much composition as the bodies are.
The light
The overhead source is undiffused, which is why it stars out in frame and why the shadow edges are that hard. It carries the wides almost on its own.
Closer in, the Aputure 300x through diffusion took key with the 60x on fill. Neewer RGB S-Tubes did the colour, and the video splits along that line. Dance sections stay cool and blue and open. The wrap sequences go deep red with cyan catching the edges of the plastic, so
the sheeting reads as something with its own light rather than a prop lit from outside.
We shot flat and built the dark-to-light arc in the grade. That was deliberate. Riding the key live across a long take puts the whole thing at the mercy of one cue, and a blown cue four minutes in means starting from the top. Flat exposure meant every take was usable and the arc got decided later with the whole performance in front of us instead of guessed at in the room.
BMPCC 6K on a Ronin RS2 throughout.
Once the spine was covered we went after b-roll that the one-shot could never give us. The best of it is a slow-shutter spin, wrap over the face, everything smearing into red and amber streaks with a single hard highlight holding through the middle. It's the only frame in the video where the camera stops describing the room and starts describing what the song feels like from inside it. That kind of shot is cheap to attempt and expensive to plan for, so we shot it after the coverage was safe rather than betting a setup on it.
The plastic wrap
The wrap is the hardest thing in the video to shoot and the easiest to get wrong. Clear plastic is a mirror. Every source in the room comes back at you, usually as a blown highlight in exactly the wrong place. Pushing the colour into the plastic instead of fighting the reflections off it was what made it work: the red and cyan turn those hot spots into structure rather than error.
The day
Call was 7:30 in the evening. We wrapped at 3 in the morning.
Three lighting setups across those seven and a half hours, and nothing went wrong, which is worth saying plainly because the hard part that night wasn't the room or the gear or the wrap. It was sync. A camera moving through choreography has to arrive somewhere at the same moment the body does, and neither one gets to wait for the other. Nail the move and the dancer is early. Nail the dancer and the move overshoots. Every take is both departments at once, and the only way through it is repetition until the two stop being separate problems. That's why a night with three setups still ran until three in the morning.
Dancers were Kat, Bre, and Nicole herself. Hera ran 1st AD and wardrobe, which on a shoot built around plastic wrap meant getting Nicole in and out of it between takes while also keeping the night on schedule.
What we took away
Nothing in this video was added to the room. No set, no build, no location doing the work for us. A rented studio with a drop ceiling and a curtain, one light we deliberately didn't soften, a roll of plastic wrap, and three dancers.
That isn't a budget story, it's a discipline one. Almost every decision that night was a decision about what to remove: the overheads, the fill that would have flattened it, the colour that wasn't earning its place, the extra stop of exposure that would have shown you the supply vents. What survives is a figure, a floor, and whatever the light agreed to keep. The room stopped being a yoga studio the moment we stopped lighting it like one.
The wrap works the same way. It holds you in place without deciding anything for you. It made sense to shoot that in a room that could be anywhere.
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