Gaffer on a Golf Commercial Shoot

Last winter, I worked on a commercial for a golf product here in Atlanta. For some reason, we shot this commercial in the dead of winter, so it was pretty cold. But despite the weather, we spent the day outside on a golf course and captured some great-looking footage.

The production company for this project was based out of Miami and flew in for the shoot. They already had a Director of Photography, but they needed a local camera crew in Atlanta to help support the production.

I joined the project as the Gaffer and supplied my lighting and grip gear. Filming a commercial on a golf course can be a challenge because you have to move everything around with golf carts. We loaded up a cart with my lights, stands, and 6x6 frames, then drove around the course to the three locations we had planned for the day.

For lighting, I used my Aputure 700X with a Fresnel lens and a 600D. The 700X was great for adding backlight to many of the shots, especially later in the day when we needed to create the feeling of warm, low sunlight. Toward the end of the shoot, I was able to use the light to make it look like the sun was setting, even as we were losing the actual daylight.

At the very end of the day, they wanted to capture some beauty shots of the product, but by that point the sun had already set. I lit the scene to make it feel like it was still golden hour. The Director of Photography was very happy with the result.

This project really would have benefited from larger bounce frames, but I made do with what the budget allowed. I used 6x6 bounce and negative fill on as many shots as I could. That helped add contrast and shape to the images, which made the shots feel more polished and gave the commercial footage a little more pop.

All in all, this was a very fun commercial shoot, even though it was freezing.

One tip: if you are going to be filming on a golf course in the winter, make sure it is not going to be freezing in the morning. Multiple hours of our day were wasted because they will not let you onto a course if the grass is frozen. Stepping on frozen grass can damage it. I doubt anyone who needs this information will read this, but you never know.

Here is my lighting setup for our "golden hour" segment

It may not look like daytime from this angle but in camera it looked great!