Simulating Sunrise

[Mike Sorel]

I have a commercial shoot this week which I am looking for advise for. I have wide interior shot in a large room with windows running the length of both the walls. The director has asked to have the outside light to simulate sunrise and the indoor light to keep a cold look. I'm trying to decide if gelling the windows with a dark orange gel or using a gelled HMI from outside to create this effect.

 

This is the room we will be shooting.

I will be using a HDX900 on this shoot.

[David Mullen ASC]

Well, in daylight balance, Cool White tubes are not actually "cool" -- they are warmer than daylight (4800K versus 5500K) so they come out a bit yellow-green on film. It's only when you are balanced to something closer to 3200K that Cool Whites look cool in comparison. Plus some green.

 

So first decision is whether you want the overheads to look both cool and green (cyan) or just cool. You could, for example, gel the windows with 1/2 CTO and make that base your "white" balance, shoot a grey scale with an HMI gelled with 1/2 CTO, or a tungsten light with 1/2 CTB. Now your daytime view is "white" and your Cool Whites are somewhat cool and greenish. Then if you used some 18K HMI's outside the window, you could gel them with an additional 1/2 CTO so that they would render has half orange in the scenario.

 

Though what I'd probably do is forget gelling the windows and use big tungsten units outside like Dinos for the warm sunlight effect, then color balance somewhere halfway between daylight and tungsten, let the outdoor view go coolish but with the warm light from the big tungstens coming in.

 

However, if you don't want the green in the fluorescents, you'd have to either replace the tubes with Kino 55 or Chroma 50, or add green gel to all the windows to match the Cool Whites, then time the green cast out.

 

I'd also consider turning half the overheads off, otherwise you've got a bright fluorescent lit room with bright sunlight coming in, which is too much light in equal amounts. You want to see the difference between the warm sunlight and the overheads so you need to bring down some of the overhead light to create some mood, let some faces be lit by the sun and others by the fluorescents.

[Andrew Brinkhaus]

Do you have access to big gun lights? If not, I would go with your idea about gelling the windows, and then balance for your interiors, and like David said, kill some of them to create a little depth and contrast and change out your floro's for 55's or 50's.

 

Remember also morning sunlight is not only warm, it contains a small amount of pink/purple.

Edited June 13, 2008 by Andrew Brinkhaus