Shot a car commercial entirely on LED walls! Full lighting & camera breakdown
Camera package:
- Sony Venice 2 with Rialto
- DZO Probe Zoom 18–28mm T8
- Olympus OM 21mm / 24mm
Core lighting package:
- 12x SkyPanel S60 (built into a 6x8m soft ceiling box)
- Astera Titan tubes (pixel-animated for motion lighting)
- Astera Hydra + AputureMC for small interior accents
- Standard grip: floppies, solids, frost frames, negative fill for chroma spill control
Pre-production / previs
I started by pulling the studio's floor plan and an FBX model of the car from production, combined them in Unreal Engine, and used that to figure out exact camera-to-screen distances before ever stepping on set. That let me solve the biggest problem of LED-wall shooting in advance: car placement relative to the screens to maximize reflections, instead of hunting for it live on set.
One issue I hadn't accounted for: a gap in coverage between the top screen and the LED curve, directly above the car. I built a 6x8m softbox out of 12 SkyPanel S60s to cover it — even, gentle top light is critical for car work, any unevenness shows immediately in the paint.
Shot-by-shot problems worth knowing:
- Eye → windshield → hood → front 3/4 shot: Used the DZO Probe at 24mm to avoid distorting the actress's face, then zoomed to 18mm during the push-in for a subtle dual-zoom feel. Asked the LED studio for a green-tinted sky gradient on the ceiling specifically to push more saturation into the car's paint.
- Logo close-up → wide reveal: Deliberately left the actress in silhouette with only screen spill as fill — kept all visual attention on the car's lightning-bolt logo, since the next cut goes straight into the dashboard.
- Interior dashboard shot: Switched to the Olympus 21mm for its close focus and low weight — the Laowa I'd planned originally couldn't physically tilt-up inside the car on the MoCo rig. We had to rig a blue chroma screen overhead (the LED ceiling wasn't sized right for this angle) and flag aggressively — spill light on a chroma screen turns black into grey and kills your key.
- Rear window fly-out, 180° pan to CGI: The real fight here was moiré. At f/8 on probe lenses, anything closer than ~3m to the LED panel started strobing. Switched to OM 21mm specifically for the extra blur it gave at distance, and treated 3m as a hard minimum working distance from the panel for the rest of the shoot.
- Final wide-to-close: OM 24mm let me get close to both car and screen without triggering moiré, while still pulling back for a full-length wide. Added a slight cool tint to the front/rear via diffusion frames to separate the car from the background and push a more dimensional look.
What I'd like feedback on
The wheel-logo shot (#2) relied entirely on screen/softbox bounce for the car's surface — no direct lighting at all on the body. It worked, but I'm curious whether others here would have added a hard kick somewhere on that panel for more shape, or if you think the flat bounce reads better for car paint in motion. Also open to hearly anyone's experience with the 3m moiré threshold — has that number held up the same way on other LED volumes you've worked on?
Final result (Vimeo, watch in HD if you can — a lot of this only reads properly at full res):
https://vimeo.com/1087042632
Happy to answer anything in the comments.