actor lighting tests

[Stuart Allman]

I'm shooting a short project this Saturday and I have an opportunity on Friday night to perform lighting tests with the actors. I watched Russell Carpenter's tutorial on actor lighting tests on the ASC web site, but haven't found any other useful references. Does anyones have tips, tricks, and tutorial links on how to best perform lighting tests on actors?

 

This project is for the Producers Guild of America contest, so I don't know the genre, nor do I have a script - I won't until Saturday morning! Ideally I'd like to get "generic" advice on how you go about testing in pre-production.

 

S. Allman

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Edited September 3, 2013 by Stuart Allman

[alika aurelya]

i usually make some actor lighting test to see their skin tone (after i light), their faces (some case you have to special treatment),

and combination actor, costume and colour in whole set (art director).

sory for my bad english

 

cheers

[Christopher M Schmidt]

You could test for shadow quality (ie if they have a big nose or something that casts strong shadows...but obviously there is other subtly) and yea the main thing being skin tone checking exposure if you are lighting for example someone with super dark skin and someone with super light skin in the same shot....or just to see how the skin reacts to light in general.

 

I think the idea of lighting talent specifically based on there appearance or skin tone etc is a bit antiquated there are some technical considerations there for sure but lighting to purely make people look nice is certainty an old school approach