A sunset campaign on a gray weekend

The brief was a black cabin on stilts over pink granite, filmed at sunset for a cabin rental brand’s winter campaign. The location was booked for two days. The forecast for both was unbroken cloud.

Rasmus Halden kept the crew on schedule and shot everything under a flat white sky, on two cinema cameras and a drone. “We framed every shot for a sun that wasn’t there,” he says. “Long lenses toward the west, and the drone on the same heading every time, so the light would have one place to come from.”

Back in the edit, the team loaded 23 selects into Glimr and set the sun to 19:10 on the hero wide. Glimr read the granite, the timber and the glass as separate surfaces and lit each one for a sun a few degrees above the sea. Kiln pushed the timber too orange, so the colorist switched to Ember. The team saved the sun and the grade together as one Look and applied it to the other 22 shots, so the light came from the same side in every cut.

Two drone shots needed more care. The confidence map showed Glimr was unsure of the depth where the sea met the sky, and the colorist painted a correction in two strokes before rendering. The 23 shots ran 2 minutes 40 seconds in total and rendered in under two minutes on Editor.

The relight took two days of post. The client reviewed the cut on frame notes and sent back three, all about pacing and none about the light. The campaign went live on Oct 26 with the Ember Look on all 23 shots, and the brand has since booked Halden & Fisk for its summer campaign.