David Regan

One of the first times I lit a scene with a very dark skinned actor, I made the mistake of overlighting them, which caused their skin tones to appear washed out and very unnatural. Dark skin is supposed to appear...well...darker, so let it photograph as such to maintain a natural look.

I don't have a huge amount of experience as an AC for digital, but with regards to your question on labeling 'rolls' in a tapeless environment, I would still say that organization is still critical and can be maintained. Considering cameras like the RED or P2 cameras that generate files for each clip recorded, I have always tried to maintain very careful organization of the clips on different backup hard drives. Everyone will have their own methods, I typically create folders for each day of shooting, and within them place folders of my 'reels' sequentially from Day 1 of shooting. With P2 cards this comes down to being Card1 Card2 etc...whereas with the RED the camera has its own organization system to name files for you. O Whatever the case I would caution against just dumping drives/cards on a computer and leaving it be for an editor to handle, I've seen media erased and copied over because people got files mixed up and thought they had copied things they hadn't. Personally data stored on hard drives terrifies me, so I like to see master/raw footage backed up on 2 or 3 drives before I erase anything.

One thing that can really help is your art direction. In scenes where you want these colors to really pop, don't have other extremely vibrant colors clashing for attention on screen. Not only will this help the colors stand out to begin with, it can also help you single them out in Post if you want to increase saturation etc...

I think we've all been in this situation at some point, white room, no art direction because it should look 'empty,' I always get headaches when I see situations like this coming up. And SD with windows doesn't necessarily help either. But to work with what you have there are certain things that in my opinion can help. Firstly if it's supposed to be an empty room, establish that. I think a good wide shot of the room showing it's blandness will help and establish it's not just a bunch of medium shots without art direction. As far as lighting, again white walls don't make it easy, but one thing you can do is line the walls behind camera and out of frame with duve/black cloth to reduce the amount of ambient light bouncing around. As far as the windows go, Adrian made a good point, you can just let them blow out, or you can expose for your exterior and throw your character's into maybe even sillouhette for the wide. Then come into the CU/MS with your lights and edge them a bit, so they are still dark but defined. If you can with your HMI you could try and create some shafts of light on the walls, that could look nice out of focus in your close ups. As Adrian said, it's all a matter of whys, figure out what works best in service of the story and do your best to go from there. Good Luck!

An incident meter (reading generally taken towards the camera, in your light source) will give you a reading that should accurately represent the range of contrast in your scene. This means your whites should look white, your blacks black, and your midtones at middle gray. A reflected meter or spot meter, will tell you what stop to use in order for that surface to read as middle gray, i.e. zone V. So, theoretically, if you took an incident reading and it gave you a 5.6, and you also put a greycard in the same lighting conditions and took a reading of the grey portion, you would also get a 5.6. What you have to consider therefor when using a spot/reflected meter, is what kind of surface you are metering, and that comes with practice and experience, and as the others mentioned; testing. Back to the greycard example, if you meter the black portion of the card in the same lighting situation, it will tell you to open up, because remembmer the meter is telling you what stop to set to get middle grey. So if you set it at that stop, perhaps a 2.8, your scene would be overexposed, and your blacks milky. Conversly if you metered the white portion of the card, in order to render it grey you would have to close down, and so you might get a reading of perhaps an 8 or so. So in regards to your question about someones face, it depends on how reflective their skin is. Again something you will learn through testing and experience. If you actor is very fair skinned, you may have to open up from your spot meter reading to accurately expose. And conversely, if your actor is a very dark skinned subject, you may have to close down. Hope this helps, goodness knows I used to get confused with it all the time and sometimes still do. Good luck!

It's a good point you ask about lampshades, because that can really make a difference. I had the experience of not really noticing this old faded lampshade in the BG once, and although I went through and switched out all the bulbs to balanced ones, when I got the film back, this lampshade was a really nasty shade (No pun in intended) of yellow in the BG of the shot. So it certainly is a good thing to work with your production designer or art director, and make sure you aren't just throwing on any old lampshade in the house.

I think there is nothing wrong with introducing yourself. As you said, you are often right next to them, have to get close to them for marks or measuring focus; them being comfortable and aquainted with you seems very sensible. I think when you are on set for the first time, when you get a chance, just introduce yourself as you are taking marks/getting focus etc...I always have introduced myself, (granted I don't work with celebrity actors) but I think it still applies for anyone, and it's not inappropriate. Just my 2 cents

I was just talking to a guy the other day who explained a system he had used for determining what circles of confusion to use for a particular lens set. He explained he was shooting 16mm, and had a particularily old set of lenses of poor quality, they were not very sharp at all. So he tested and determined the resolving power of the lens in line pairs per millimeter (lp/mm) What he then realized was that he could use this to determing the minimum CoC needed for that particular lens. Say the resolving power was 40lp/mm, then 1mm/40 = .025, his circle of confusion for that lens. He based this on figuring, if the lens can't even resolve something of finer sharpness than .025mm, acceptable focus was not as criticle. I thought about it, and to me it seems quite clever. Obviously it would require you to test each lens and could have different results for each lens in your set, but it just seemed like an interesting and smart idea, especially with today's palm programs, where you can dial in your CoC and calculate DoF from there. Does anyone see any problem with this being a theoretical way to determine necessary CoC? (Or perhaps it's standard and I've just been oblivious, which is quite possible.)

Just saw the D-21 today, got an overview of it and got to play around a bit, up at the Maine Workshops. Very nice I must say, I'm not an expert in HD by any means but from my basic knowledge and what I saw/was explained, it was very nice. Sensitivity now boosted from ASA320 on the D-20 to 800 on the D-21. And of course the RAW output, 4:4:4 recording capability. So while I can't give much of a professional opinion, what I saw was still impressive, looks very promising.

Valuable information thanks for that! Stills look great, I really like the shot of the two men in the kitchen. Thanks for the detailed updates.

Looks really interesting, very visually stylistic, I'm enjoying these stills. I particularly like the 3rd one down, it seems very painterly to me. What final look are you going for with this film visually? I'm curious because it seems on the one hand to be very soft with the diffusion you are using, it all has this very brushstroke painterly feel, especially with the backdrop. Yet on the other hand, it has some very harsh, direct lighting, with the Xenon shafts of light beating into the house. I guess I've just never thought about combining two seemingly opposed visual styles, but it certainly seems to be working. Also, I'm interested with working with a backdrop. I take it from your post you can manipulate the color of the sky and brightness by lighting it the actual cyc, how much latitude do you really have in changing the 'look' of the background, or is it pretty subtle? It just seems interesting to me, that you are lighting something that is pretending to be the light source.

What type of HD camera are you using? Big issue I've found with smaller prosumer cameras is controlling contrast between sky and ground, i.e. sky will be blown out or your subjects underexposed. When you get a really overexposed sky, I've run into problems with cameras such as the HVX where you get serious chromatic abberation, which can look pretty terrible at times. Work with fill and bounce to even out your ratio a bit into a realm the camera can handle. Also, depending on your equipment, diffusion material overhead your subjects can help, especially when the sun gets really toppy and harsh overhead. (Unless of course this is a desired look). I've never stacked that many filters so I can't accurately comment on the results. But yes a grad ND is one way to control a bright sky. Good luck

I've never worked with Lowell flourescent fixtures so I'm sure someone else with more experience could answer that better, but I can imagine you'd get similar results. My concern would be the integrity of the color output of the tubes compared to Kino. Actually spotty fixtures on the ceiling might motivate more interesting results, you can create different pools of light from above, which allows for some more motivated control over the lighting setup. Depending on what type of fixtures are in the ceiling, you could swap for some higher output bulbs for your wide then when you punch in on closeups, use smaller tungsen film lights.

I can't be positive, haven't tried this before so this is just from what it looks like to me, but it looks like an effect you could get with bare 5600 perhaps through some diffusion material, maybe 1/4 ctb or some such to cool it down, and shot with daylight balance. Other than that it looks like some sort of breakup pattern is used on them, note the shadows and dappled effect on the subjects shoulder and chest. That's just my guess, testing would be the best way find out and get the look you want. Good luck.

Are there windows in this room? That would be one key place to start, assuming the necessary budget you could bring in large sources through the windows to bring up the daylight. Assuming not, swapping bulbs with balanced Kino Tubes would be one way to go. That would get you even, matching lighting for the whole room. Then you can start to refine it, perhaps skirting the overheads to keep them off the walls, then in closeups, bring in some additional units as it sounds like you did, to help create some contrast and separation. Obviously drastic changes will result in inconsistant footage as you observed, but there are subtle changes you can make i.e. backlight, eyelight, adjust the ratio on the face slightly, that will help with the picture. Good Luck

Yeah I was using a prime, but it was an old Cooke Series2, and rather worn so I'm not sure about the quality of the coating. Tim- Your reply make sense to me, but I'm still a bit confused since some shots have blown out windows without washing out the image. Possibly just what Michael mentioned about coating? I think the filter I had in was an 85 which probably didn't help with the flaring issue <_< I have an upcoming shoot with a planned shot of someone sitting on a couch in front of a window, straight on, so I'm trying to avoid the past mistake. Thanks all

I was curious as ways to avoid getting a washed out image from pointing the camera directly at a window. I recently had a shoot where there were two characters in the FG and a window in the BG, and the window essentaily flared the entire image, washing out the contrast pretty badly. However I see in films all the time, situations like this, and there is none terrible flaring. Take No Country for Old Men for instance, all the blown out windows which I think looks stunning, and there is none of this low contrast issue. Any way I can safely aim my lens at a window, blown out or not, and avoid this problem? Thanks for the help.

Hmm I went to your page and watched your reel but there was no sleep shift stuff in there. Odd. I ment different bar stuff. I'll check it again.

Haha is that Nick in the ext. handheld stuff? Hilarious. Some shots I really dig, I like the bar stuff as was mentioned, and your last shot, has a very painterly effect I really enjoyed, nice tones and contrast. Gonna cut in Sleep Shift footage in there?

Some things I found useful: 1. Write things down. I kept a little notebook in my back pocket, and wrote everything especially people's names, I think it looks better if you can call people by name. Also the things others mentioned, how people like their coffee etc. Plus since it was a great learning experience I just wrote down whenever I had a spare moment things I noticed about how things were done. 2. No excuses. I certainly messed up several times, but really they don't care why something went wrong. Simply accept the fault, say 'sorry, my fault, it won't happen again.' (And of course be really sure it doesn't happen again ;) 3. Just have a really good attitude. I think thats a huge part of it, no matter how smart/talented people are, if they aren't pleasent to work with I think that has a huge impact. So yeah, seems like a lot given all the other good advice, but just keep on your toes, work hard, have a good attitude and you'll be fine. Good Luck

Ok so each frame is projected twice essentially? Basically if I understand, each 1/24th of a second is divided into 4ths, frameA/black/frameA/black and then frameB/black/frameB/black? Is that a correct understanding? Thanks

Just a point of curiosity I had, sort of off topic, and wondered if anyone could clear up for me. I understand in the camera movemnent, with a say, 180 degree shutter, the film is exposed for 1/48th of a second. How does this correlate to film projection, Is it essentially a camera with a light behind it? In other words does each frame get projected for 1/48th of a second, then pulled down as the shutter blocks the light, or is each frame projected longer, with shorter intervals between frames? Just curious, not very familier with standard film projection. Thanks

Sounds like plenty for what you'll need. It all depends on what the film calls for though, if you want less dramtic, higher key stuff, I'd say the Kinos you have can probably work fine, rigged up to the ceiling, and perhaps some below for fill. If you want lower key, more dramatic, perhaps your dedos up high spotting down on the characters, keping the light off the walls. Good Luck

It sounds like from your description of the bartender shot, if you had your keys on the patrons set up higher, you could then put a topper on those lights, so it hits them but not the back of the bar where the bartender walks. Then the bartender could be lit by his own sources. I feel your pain though, I've had and still have plenty of agonizing times spent on set as well, trying to deal with unpleasing shadows. Good Luck.