I shot this music video cover in the same day and location as two other videos - I wanted to do something distinct to make this one stand out (but was heavily constrained by budget, so it had to be affordable).
After a few production meetings with the artist, we found out that she loves vibrant colors and interesting shapes (especially hearts). I wanted to really bring that out in an interesting way by playing with the shape of the bokeh.
I worked for a few days before the shoot creating DIY paper filters to alter the shape of the bokeh. I started with black construction paper, and I cut it into circles of various sizes to match the diameter of the lenses that I planned to use. I also made a "lens hood" out of paper - aka, a strip of paper rolled and taped into a tube to fit my lens.
Then I used an X-Acto knife to cut various shapes and words into the center of the paper circles. It took a bit of trial and error to figure out the right size for the cutouts. After some experimentation, it seems that the cutout needs to be about 1 stop smaller than the aperture you'll be shooting on. To make things easier, I kept the aperture wide open at 1.8 and sized the cutouts from there.
On the day of the shoot, I just swapped out various cutouts on the lenses and played around with the focus to get all kinds of shapes and words in the bokeh. The only downside to taping a piece of construction paper to the lens was slight vignetting... but I actually liked the way it looked, so I added vignette to all the other shots to match.
