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This spring, Marisa Davis took her daily gig on the road, or should we say, in the air. The Ellen Degeneres Show shot on-location 30,000 ft. in the air, en route from Los Angeles to New York. Ellen also continued her summer in the park series, on location outside the NBC Studios in Burbank.
THE PLANE SHOW:
Davis had to light two locations for “the plane show.” The first act taped at the terminal gate at LAX before boarding the plane, the remainder of the show, complete with host, guests, audience members and full production staff… and of course, the flight crew was accomplished in flight!
Ellen did her opening monologue in front of floor to ceiling terminal windows. Outside, the audience could see the plane onto which they were about to board and used for the flight show.
“My main challenge in the terminal was to make certain that she "popped" in front of the bright white plane outside a bright window,” Davis explains. “We taped this act at 9am in the morning and we expected light cloud cover. There was, and that gave me a nice even light on everything outside the window.” Ellen was lit with a 4k HMI through a silk over her main camera and filled with 2 2.5k HMIs through silks. The audience was facing the window so only backlight was needed; this was done with 1200w HMIs. All the lights were on stands and therefore, the crew started rigging at about 2am to be ready for a 7am focus. Flags and cutters were ready to go in case of any reflections in the windows from the HMIs however they were all high enough so there were no reflection problems.
On the plane! Davis explained that The FAA has very tight rules regarding every aspect of a shoot such as this.
1)Everything: lights, video equipment and audio equipment had to be packed and stowed in the overhead bins for take-off and landing. Therefore, no set-up or focus time.
2) ALL equipment had to be handheld. The plan in case of turbulence: Whoever was holding equipment would sit down and buckle themselves in and hold on to the equipment to keep it from flying around the cabin.
3) NOTHING could generate too much heat.
4) NO cables were allowed on the floor so everything had to be battery operated.
5) Certain types of batteries are not allowed on the plane.
So… taping on a plane at 30,000 feet not only confronts you with an enormous lack of space but we had to accommodate an audience of 100, 5 cameras with operators, a still photographer, 2 producers, 2 electricians, plus the flight crew, all in the back third of the plane where the actual taping took place. We took out the first three rows of the center section in the back coach section of the plane; this served as our home base. Ellen and her guests played in front of the wall at the front of this seating area behind which was a galley that separated the back section of coach from the middle seating section on the plane. In that middle section was the rest of the production staff, about 60 in all, with a video village built on refreshment carts from which had been removed all of the shelves. First class was used for the guests: Allison Janney, beauty expert Kym Douglas and their “people.”
We taped in the middle of the day and for the audience shots we wanted it to look like daytime so we couldn't close the shades on the windows. There was also ambient bounce light that was fluorescent. Obviously, this had to be kept simple! We used two litepanels 1x1 on stands held by electricians as front fill, went with 5600k to match the color temperature of the daylight coming through the windows. The goal was to use these to fill Ellen & her guests’ faces yet add enough light to pop them a bit. We went with the spot units figuring we could diffuse them down if necessary. After white balancing the cameras we ended up going with a 1/8 CTO to warm up skin tones and it worked really well. After take-off the gaffer, Robbie Dick, rigged mini-litepanels on mayfer clamps with flex arms onto the wall behind Ellen and the guest. These were perfect for backlights. We didn't color correct them and ran them at about 50% but the LED lights don't change color temperature when dimmed so they were still 5600k. The Litepanel LED lights gave off no heat and were all battery powered. We taped 6 acts which totaled about 45 minutes of tape and the batteries lasted the entire time. We, of course, had spare batteries just in case.
THE PARK SHOW
The challenge of the park show is shooting outside at 5pm without a cover on the stage to help block the sunlight. The stage faces almost due west so the setting sun acts as a giant front light. This works fine for Ellen's monologue and Act 1 comedy as she faces directly out. It becomes a problem when as the show gets into the interview acts and Ellen talks to the guest sitting beside her. At that point the downstage side of her face is lit by the setting sun and upstage side of her face has to be filled. “This year I used 3 Vari lite 3500 spots from upstage. I layered them in onto her and color corrected them with CTO to match the color of the late day sun,” describes Davis. The same was done for the guest’s seating. There is always have a big musical guest for the park show and this year it was Kelly Clarkson.
The challenge with music on this stage is to make the lighting sparkle in the middle of the day. Davis used “VL5 arcs across the back horizontal truss of the stage and Mac 2K wash units on the upstage vertical truss legs. These gave me the opportunity to do ballyhoo and color chases which add excitement to the wide shots and the low hand held shots. Also to give some movement in the wide jib shots I used 4 Vari lite 3500s on the downstage truss. I pointed them out at the jib and put rotating patterns in them so the jib was constantly getting hits of light. I used the VL 3500s that had been upstage fill light in the interviews to wash the front edge of the stage and I put rotating patterns in these. One of our hand-held camera operators, Chip Frazier, was on the ground getting low shots just at stage level. The VL 3500s were shooting right down his lens to give us hits of light as the patterns rotated. It really looked great and gave the park show a real sparkle that it hadn't had before.”
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