Bud, like many short films, came together through the efforts of a small team who simply wanted to create something meaningful. Writer and actor Conor Hall initially envisioned the script as a dramatic character study that could be achieved without extensive resources. This setup offered the perfect opportunity to experiment with minimalistic lighting and camera techniques, striking a balance between creating an immersive atmosphere and maintaining efficiency throughout the shoot.
The total budget was just $500, covering the cost of a motel room location, meals, and travel for a five-person crew: Director, Producer, DP, and two actors. Of course, this doesn’t account for the theoretical cost of labor and gear, both generously donated, or the hours spent location scouting. Scouting mostly involved convincing various NYC motels that we weren’t filming anything risqué and, unfortunately, that we also didn’t have HBO money.
One of the main production challenges was finding a motel room that felt lived-in and carried a sense of texture. Most motels today have a sterile, uniform look, closer to a Holiday Inn Express—great for road trips, terrible for film sets. Luckily, the REDACTED Motel in REDACTED, New York, had just the right amount of character, offering a space with enough grit to enhance the film’s mood without needing extensive set dressing.
Lighting Intention:
The setup was stripped down to three key fixtures:
1x Aputure 1200D Pro
1x Astera Titan Tube
1x Aputure Bulb
Based on the scout, the sun would pour through the bathroom window at a sharp angle about an hour after call time, which set our shooting schedule. The bathroom scenes needed to be first to capture that natural light. I positioned Conor backlit by the sun, carefully checking false color to ensure the highlights were just under clipping. A small bounce board was added for fill, to avoid overpowering the scene while keeping it natural.
The motel room, as a whole, served as a sort of purgatory—a space where the characters are stuck, grappling with their unresolved trauma. The bathroom, being the only part of the room with an uncovered window, became the first source of direct daylight, a visual representation of the outside world they’ve been avoiding. Before the characters fully open up to each other, the daylight is harsh and overwhelming, reflecting the emotional weight they carry. As they begin to adjust to their truths, so does the lighting. The audience’s eyes, along with the characters’, gradually adapt to the brightness, symbolizing the clarity they start to find. This progression, from harsh, overexposed light to a more balanced visual, mirrors their journey—an intentional parallel between visual and emotional clarity.
The practical lamp with the Aputure bulb served to heighten the sense of interrogation between the characters. Rather than tilt it down and create the main push from the tube light, I opted instead to lean into the harshness of the lamp, direct it straight at the characters, and utilize the tube as a supplemental fill only. It both highlighted Janina’s profile in a visually compelling and dramatic way, while providing a unique fiery eye light that suggested her character’s intuition and heightened perception. Later, as the action shifts towards the door, Janina is backlit by the lamp, which now casts its interrogatory light in Bud’s direction.
Tech Specs:
For Bud, I chose the ARRI Alexa35 primarily for its ability to handle extreme overexposure while still retaining color fidelity in the highlights. The camera’s latitude was a crucial factor, especially given the minimalist lighting setup. With natural light playing a significant role, I needed a camera that could manage the bright, direct sunlight without losing detail or color accuracy. The Alexa35 allowed me to push exposures beyond what most cameras can handle, maintaining crucial highlight information even in harshly lit conditions.
Technically, lower ISO settings typically offer more dynamic range and clarity in the shadows but often at the cost of blown-out highlights. However, the Alexa35 allows for exposing at lower sensitivities while still retaining fine detail and color information in the highlights, making it possible to recover those details even at low ISOs. This balance was critical in achieving the look I wanted: an outside world that felt intensely bright, almost blinding, to contrast the liminal interior.
We shot in Open Gate 4.6K at ISO 400, to balance sensitivity and maintain the depth and richness of the image. The Alexa35 utilizes an in-camera noise reduction and retexturing process to add customizable grain structures, such as ones intended to emulate 16 or 35mm film. Using the G522 Soft Nostalgic texture helped reduce some of the sharpness associated with digital sensors, adding a more filmic softness that complemented the emotional tone of the film. In order to more accurately convey the grain structure of G522, I tried to keep the underlying image signal as clean and noise-free as possible. ProRes 4444XQ was the chosen codec, ensuring that we retained as much color depth and detail as possible throughout post-production.
In post, color grading was done in DaVinci Resolve Studio, working within the AWG4/LogC4 color space. This wide color gamut provided the necessary latitude for fine-tuning the overexposed highlights while still preserving the rich detail in the midtones and shadows. The Alexa35’s ability to recover color information in overexposed areas became a vital tool, allowing us to push certain scenes visually without compromising the overall integrity of the image.
Lensing and Filtration:
For lenses, I opted for ARRI Signature Primes—21mm, 40mm, and 75mm at T1.8. These lenses offered a perfect balance of sharpness and smoothness, with a natural focus fall-off that worked well in the tight quarters of the motel room. Their consistent rendering of skin tones and color made them a go-to choice, particularly in a film that required the camera to be close to the actors, capturing subtle emotional details.
Filtration was a critical part of the visual design. The ARRI Impression V 330P Positive Rear Filter was used to introduce subtle spherical aberrations, which added a touch of organic imperfection to the image. This filter provided a delicate blooming effect in the highlights, creating a soft, almost nostalgic quality, while maintaining a natural feel. It also imparted a slight color shift, enhancing the warmth and emotional tone of key scenes. The impression filter gave the film a unique texture, lending the visuals a more analog, dreamlike feel that aligned with the story’s emotional beats.
In conjunction with this, I used a Schneider "Radiant Soft 1" front filter to further soften the image. This filter smoothed out the skin tones, reduced sharp contrast, and added a subtle halation to the highlights. The goal was to maintain clarity while avoiding the overly clinical sharpness that modern digital sensors can sometimes produce. The combination of the Impression V and Radiant Soft filters allowed for a more tactile, cinematic texture, while preserving the finer details necessary for the performances.
Additionally, I utilized the Alexa35’s Internal Full Spectrum Neutral Density (FSND) filters—0.6, 1.2, and 1.8 stops—throughout the shoot. These filters were essential for controlling exposure, particularly in the brightly lit daytime scenes. They allowed me to shoot wide open at T1.8, keeping the shallow depth of field intact and focusing attention on the characters while maintaining color consistency across all lighting conditions. The FSND filters ensured that even when exposure was controlled, there was no unwanted color shift, keeping the image consistent from scene to scene.