Happy Boxing Day! (or unboxing day?) My friends at @aputure.lighting are doing a huge contest right now across socials. All you have to do is post photos and talk about your favorite piece of gear this year, tag @aputure.lighting, and #AputureUnboxingDay Since I'm pretty sure I'm ineligible anyway, I wanna bend the rules and talk about my favorite FEATURE I used this year - DMX (Digital Multiplex Signal). For the CWS video visualizer, @iwoosung wanted him and @bigmatthewww to be driving a convertible down the Pacific Coast Highway, in one uninterrupted take. I proposed a more VFX-heavy idea. It would be in front of a greenscreen, and we would travel through multiple famous LA environments, thus highlighting how beautiful "California West Side" actually is. We set out (with a camera rig suctioned to the back of @brianafrapart's car) to capture all the different environmental background plates we’d need for the video. Then I created a roadmap of where all the lights should be around the car, and how they should be positioned so that the correct light would hit our subjects at the right time, to match the background of each scene. For example, we had two @aputure.lighting P600c panels on either side of the car, programmed via DMX to emit one pixel traveling front-to-back, to make it look like they were passing street lights at night. All these cues were programmed into the Blackout app by my DMX operator @shredthegaff off of diagrams that I gave him. He could use the app to switch between each lighting setup with ease, once all the lights were connected to DMX. On the day of the shoot, I used OBS to live-key the greenscreen out of the preview monitor. There was an indicator for Arjay to show him exactly how much time we had left in each setup, and which setup was next. We ended up doing 6 complete takes and used take 5! After a lot of time in post putting the lyrics on billboards, rotoscoping hands and legs, and blending the color, CWS was released! I’m proud of our small team and thanks to @aputure.lighting for the lights. The ability to control them via DMX was exactly what we needed. BTS by @randybitch