Jessica Rabbit Style Shoot: Behind the Scenes Behind the scenes of a 3 light studio setup

Photographer Robert Hall recently posted an interesting behind the scenes video of a shoot inspired by the fictional movie character Jessica Rabbit (from the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit). Creating the lighting for this scene required some planning and Hall explains his thought process behind the final shot and shows how he got there.

For this shoot, Hall wanted to use the Godox optical snoot designed for the Godox S30 LED but It had to be adapted into a Bowens S mount using the new Godox SA-17 Bowens to SA-P adapter. This is O.K. for LEDs but not ideal for most strobes (the tube can get in the way). The problem is that LEDs, even powerful ones are not powerful enough to completely eliminate ambient light, luckily the Godox AD400 strobe did work with the adapter so Hall was able to use it.

To actually create the look of a round hard stage light that Hall was going for he used the optical snoot on the AD400 with the SA-17 adapter and he placed his subject relatively close to the background and quite a bit away from the snoot to create harder shadows.

Next Hall used a large 48″ parabolic softbox with a grid that he placed to the side of his subject to help separate her from the background. For this light, it was important to give more power but at the same time prevent this light from spilling into the background and destroying the sharp edge circle of light from the first, background light so placing the light above and from the side (with a grid as mentioned) helped to get the right look.

Finally to get that extra bit of depth to the subject a hair light was added from the other direction. This was done with another flash with a snoot to focus the light and, again, prevent spill to the background.

The combination of all these 3 strobes with their specific modifiers gave Hall the final image which Hall improved in post for the resulting image (9:42 in the video) with a very dramatic look in the studio.

As always you can find more helpful photography tips on our Photography tips section and many more behind the scenes videos on the BTS section here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

1 comment

  1. I would appreciate any tips on shooting photos. I have a Nikon camera. I have been trying to take 3D photos with out PC. I am not getting any where. I am not going to buy a 3D camera for 2-3 photos. Plus I don’t need another camera like my Nikon. Have any Ideas.

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