Lighting a scene set at dawn

Satsuki Murashige · April 2, 2007

Okay, here's the cut scene on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7zoDzMuSNg

I did the editing and post sound for this version (the director will do his own cut for the class). So if you guys have any comments/criticisms on the editing as well as the camerawork, I'd be happy to hear them (it's the best way to learn, right?). :)

Thanks for viewing.

P.S. I know the audio is noisy -- unfortunately, it's part of the original recording (lousy school mic), so I did my best to EQ it out, but it's there. The web compression seems to have made it worse. Eghh.

Hal Smith · April 2, 2007

Okay, here's the cut scene on YouTube.

I have a problem with the lack of eyelight for speaking and reacting actors. Good actors act with their eyes and unless an actor is in hard silhouette I believe there always should be a bit of light in their eyes.

David Mullen ASC · April 2, 2007

I have a couple of thoughts here...

The most interesting wide shot would have been similar to that frame you grabbed from "Sense and Sensibility" -- looking towards the window with the bed in the f.g. I know that when someone comes through a door, many directors want to stage the master towards the door in the background but in this tiny dorm room, that's a pretty dull angle. Anyway, you don't have a looser angle towards the black actor to match the reverse angle, so you don't see the room really, the relationship between the bed, window, and desk.

The staging was a bit too head-on. Maybe that's the way the scene was written, that the guy stands up immediately and confronts the two white guys. But imagine, for example, if the black actor were sitting facing the window or at a 90 degree angle to the window and turned when he heard the door open... and the other guy had to walk in and arc around the bed a little to face him. Then you could have had a master two-shot almost in profile with the window & bed in the shot. Or keep your blocking but pull a side wall to shoot a 50/50 wide shot with the window frame left (probably off-camera), the desk and lamp in the middle, and the two white guys on frame right.

Anyway, it would have been nice if one of the wide shots had shown the desk lamp that is keying everyone's faces. Sometimes you have to cheat furniture around to get all the elements into the shot. Don't be afraid to lift a desk or bed higher, slide it in closer, etc.

Or you could have placed the desk and lamp closer to the door so that it appears in the two-shot of the guys walking in. That way, their faces would have been backlit by the lamp and filled-in by the window light, whereas the black guy would have been backlit by the window and filled-in/keyed more frontally by the desk lamp. Right now, you've got both the window and the desk lamp as keys favoring the white guys, and both are slightly behind the black guy (which is OK as a concept too, keeping him somewhat shadowy. If the desk lamp effect weren't so hard & bright on the reverse angle, I would have accepted it more.)

But assuming you wanted the window in the b.g. of the close-up, and the door in the b.g. of the reverse close-up, which is also a good idea (more depth), then the other problem is using a flattened sheet hanging in front of the window.

When you hard light something like that with a sunlight effect, you just get a bright square pattern of the window, which is flat & bright (and hard for video to handle, plus you've got it behind a black actor's face). At least a dappled tree branch pattern would have helped. Otherwise, to get the effect of a ray of sun penetrating the room, you really needed to open up a gap in the curtain and let the light fall into the room, not get stopped by the curtain. But then you need to address the view through the gap.

I liked the sort of cyan color to the window light and how it filled in the room. The desk lamp effect probably should have been lower and warmer.

Jonathan Bowerbank · April 2, 2007

I thought this was supposed to take place at dawn? Watching the footage, it seemed more night with its low-key and high contrast. Maybe I read into it wrong, but it wasn't what I expected. Maybe the curtain shouldn't have been blue like it was and your contrast ratio could have been a bit closer.

I would second Hal's comment about your actors' eyes. We hardly saw the black actor's eyes. Also, the guy standing in the corner of the room seemed to nearly disappear into that wall. It would have been nice to get some separation there, or possibly just a practical next to him so we can generally see him better.

But your main two actor's keys seemed too "white" to act as a morning light. I think a bit of 1/2 CTO, a light angle that was coming more horizontally rather than above, and a shot where the window is actually in the frame would have psychologically put us either in a dawn or dusk mentality.

music's a little overbearing too ;)

btw, great film to take a scene from. Notoriously depressing, but a beautiful film nonetheless.

Edited April 2, 2007 by Jonathan Bowerbank

Satsuki Murashige · April 3, 2007

Thanks for the feedback, guys!

Hal, you're right, I should of had an eyelight for Gideon (the black character) when he's standing - I actually did try to set one up, but couldn't figure it out quick enough. I guess the best thing would have been to put a small bounce card next to the lens and angle the key to hit it more, so that the white square would be reflected in his eyes. I'm definitely prone to underlighting (that's a polite word for it :)), so I have to watch for that.

What did you think of the lighting when he's sitting, with the fill from below? Was there enough of an eyelight in that shot to your taste, or would you have preferred more fill there as well? What about the other shots/actors? I tried to make sure that we would be able to see their eyes, but maybe I was wrong?

Hi David,

I agree with you that we needed a reverse wide master toward the window, showing more of the room and the practical -- I actually suggested this to director several times during preproduction, but he decided that he didn't want it. I also suggested the profile framing for the first part of the scene (which wouldn't have been a problem as we only had three walls), and an alternate blocking where Gideon had fallen asleep waiting for the boys to return and therefore would have gotten up more slowly. But the director didn't believe that Gideon would have fallen asleep, given the danger he was in (black kid in a white-only boarding school), which I sort of agreed with. Overall though, I got the impression that he had already decided the blocking and camera angles beforehand and just didn't want to change them.

Another problem with shooting toward the window was that he had promised me that he would get a thick canvas-like curtain, which of course turned into a translucent curtain on the day of the shoot. So we tacked up some fabric that didn't look very good and didn't cover the whole window, which meant that I couldn't shoot it full on with the actor's head framed in front of it.

Yet another problem was the lamp -- the prop man and I had gone to the prop shop to pick out a working desk lamp a few hours before, and then we both forgot to plug it in on set. So we didn't actually have a working practical. But what I could have done was put the key light on a dimmer to lower the intensity and warm up the color temperature to make it look more like a lamp. I also belatedly figured out how to clamp the Mafer on top of the stage flat to get the Dedo lower -- the pin should have been toward the inside of the set (duh!).

I like your suggestion of putting the practical closer to the door -- it could have been on the dresser that Morrie leans on, which would have given him more separation from the wall in the master, as Jonathan pointed out.

As for dappling the window light, that's another thing I forgot! I had actually hand-picked some leafy eucalyptus branches a few days before to hang above the window frame and brought them to the set. But then I forgot to put them up. Man, I'm going to have a checklist for my next shoot! In retrospect, I spent too much time netting the lens, and not enough directing the photography. What I was really going for with the "rising sun" idea was not so much a shaft of light, but the soft pinkish glow that lights up an east-facing curtain as the sun just peeks over the horizon. It's a very subtle effect, especially if you're facing the wall opposite the window as we were. As I mentioned before, I only got one take in the master to try it out before we decided to drop it, but I ended up using part of that take later on in the edit, so the effect is there.

Hi Jonathan,

Well, it's was supposed to be pre-dawn, but you're right the contrast ratio was off. The "lamp" needed to be lower, dimmer and warmer (I had a 600w dimmer in my bag too, crap), and the skylight needed to be brighter (should have used a 5K). I have to tell you, I wondered when someone would say something about the music. Well, what can I say? :rolleyes: It was already on my computer and I was too lazy to look for something more subtle. :) I actually haven't seen the film yet, so don't tell me how it turns out.