Poetry in a Bottle | Wine Commercial

Alexandria is a long-time friend and collaborator of mine (The Middle, Anti-Joke), and we found ourselves working together on a music video together for the pop artist Julia Rizik. While on that project, she showed me a bottle of wine that she designed and personally picked out the grapes for and told me that she’d love to do a shoot with the bottle someday to try selling some outside of the few high-scale restaurants that stock it. Not only did I love the design of the bottle, but I also really wanted to take on the challenge of shooting glass and especially shooting a dark bottle.

The lighting setup was a bit complicated but purposeful. First, we used the practical LED lights strung around the room running at about 2700k to give a warm glow to the brown cabinets and old wood. Next, the 300D with the Light Dome II and a grid was used to key the bottle, hitting it pretty much straight on and mainly giving level and detail to the label. We did a few shots where this was faded up to give the sense that it was getting brighter in-camera. The two Astera AX1s were then rigged on either side as a beautiful rim light. Finally, the “secret sauce” of shooting bottles: 250 Diffusion cut out and taped to the back of the bottle, with an Arri 300w spotted (and heavily cut and scrimmed) fresnel shooting directly into it, letting the dark red wine show through the bottle.

On this shoot, my assistant Alexis Vigil was my only crewmember, and we worked with a dana dolly, Aputure 300d, and two Astera AX1s. It was a very tight space, and we scarcely had a foot of space between us and a wall at all times, but we promptly executed our lighting plan and shot list in record time.

We thought this was a very luxurious and dreamy look, which was inspired by the poetry behind the bottle as well as the design of the label. Another punchier commercial was cut from the same footage and was used on social media during an ad campaign.

This was shot on the Blackmagic Pocket 4k with my own custom vintage Pentax glass.