The idea here was sort of a play on words, how moving can I make a photograph? I hired an actress who could cry on command, which is a talent that absolutely mystifies me. I wanted her to go through a range of emotion from happy to sad, but for reasons that became clear once we started shooting, it is impossible to go quickly from happy to sad, but rather easy to go from sad to happy. I guess if one is a complete sociopath ……. but then that would also be problematic. So I let her get into severe sadness, which took her about 2 minutes, then had her go to happy. We reversed the direction in Final Cut, which if you look at the blinks, you will notice that something is up. I rather like it, an extra added unsettling bit. The shot was done with a 90TS with the focus on the eyes. My experience is that in motion work, many lenses work great that I would never dream of using in stills work for seeming to gimmicky. The entire shooting process lasted about 2 hours, and about 15 takes, after which everyone on set was exhausted. It is really quite powerful to cause then witness up close emotions like this.

The light is a 4 tube dim-able Kino to the right and a dimmed Starlight to the left. The lights in the background are the kitchen fluorescence. ASA 640, 60sec, f 4, 5000k.

Gear:
Canon 5D II set at ASA 600
90 mm ST lens
3 stop BW ND filter
Manfrotto 3051 tripod w/503 fluid head
Kino Flo 4 bulb w/gel
Marshall V-LCD-70P-HDMI monitor hot shoe mounted
StarLites 1000w on dimmers
Mac G5
Glyph Raid
Final Cut Studio
Compressor
Sorrenson Squeeze