It's all about diffusion

Stills from a film we did with Muay Thai boxer Duane Barnes about taking the game to the fight. This was a self-initiated piece and had a budget of £0,00, and we wanted to see how far we could push the limitations we had to create something quite cinematic.

In the shot above, the camera (Sony FS7) was on the floor of the gym, looking slightly up. Lens at 24mm with a Tiffen digital diffuser filter 1 on. We smoked the room for diffusion as well. There were two Kinoflo Celeb 200 LEDs (which we still had from another job) on Duane’s back. The rest of the light came from practicals and the skylight. I shot with a wide aperture and used ND filters to block out the light, because we were going for a dark, dramatic look. Shooting it at 120fps added to the drama. I love boxing shots in slow motion.

Grade was done in DaVinci Resolve, using Osiris cinematic film emulation 3D LUTs at 1080p HD with added 35mm film grain. I deliberately pushed for a silvery, green look, trying to get close to some of my favourite higher end branded online content of some of the big sports brands.

Here are some more stills from that scene and the full video as well.