…tariffs were on everyone’s mind. Most exhibitors had the same response when questioned on how they might affect product costs: all anyone can really do is wait and see. Price points for new products were given out with an asterisk. Many of the companies present at the show (and profiled below) are based in China; a cursory scroll through the show directory, for example, found 17 companies listed with a company name that began with “Shenzhen” (the technological hub in southeastern China).

Filmmaker: How many days did you shoot?

Rosman: Twenty days. I worked with Mark Evans, a great cinematographer in Los Angeles, and we’ve probably done 17 things together, including a handful of music videos. We shot with a [RED] Gemini, and what we liked about it is its great dual ISO. It’s 800 and 3,200, which means that our lighting package could be stretched a bit further because we were still going to have image quality in low light. For prep, we did a mini documentary series that was ambitious in scope — 24 different vignettes in Los Angeles at different hours of the day. They were a minute long, one in each hour, and the final piece was going to be 24 minutes. We went with this crew that cleans up Skid Row every morning at 6:00 AM, we went to an alpaca farm. We ended up filming 12 of them. I never released them, but they were cool. I wanted to really hone in what our visual style could look like using this specific camera, how far we could push it. The other stuff Mark and I had shot together was with an ALEXA Mini LF and music video lighting, and this one was documentary style, so I wanted to flex that muscle with him.

As far as prep goes, we used a Cine Tracer, and after our [location] scouts, Mark built every single environment. We had the two characters in there, and then we mapped out the entire movie, the idea being you show up on the day and you have the printout of the full shot list and then that opens you up to being able to be more creative.