David Mullen ASC

It’s a very spotted-in light and the shot is exposed to let the center of the spot be very hot. Then there is some lens diffusion to cause the bright area to glow. In many scenes, something like a tungsten PAR64 with a spot, narrow spot, or very narrow spot globe was used but the size and power of the unit depends on the distance to subject, the sensitivity of the camera, etc. In a smaller space, for example, I’ve used a tweenie 650w at full spot pointed down with a snoot, or I’ve used a 150w Dedolight at full spot. Or I’ve gone bigger, to a 1K baby. Almost any lens diffusion will cause some halation around bright lights but in this case, it was something like a ProMist.

Cool soft skylight and warm hard sunlight. You could go with 5600K soft light for the sky and 3200K light for the sun and then color-correct your tungsten stock in post for something in between, basically warm up the shot. If you want less extreme of a difference, more midday than late afternoon, use something more like 4300K-to-4700K for the sky and 3200K for the sun.

If you were shooting b&w stock, tungsten-vs-HMI would have a minor affect on tonal rendition of colored objects but not really if you are shooting in color and converting in post to b&w. Mainly you control the contrast of costumes by design, and you control the contrast of the lighting by your lighting ratios, not by using colored lighting.

Keep in mind that the softness of a light depends on its size relative to the subject, so if the object is tiny then the soft light doesn't have to be very large to be soft. If you're lighting a golf ball and bring a 1K Fresnel with 216 on the barn doors just two feet from the ball, it's going to be a soft light. So flagging the light is the same as if you scaled everything larger for full size objects -- small lights, small diffusion pieces, small flags, snoots (sometimes made with black wrap), negative fill, etc.

It comes down to saying in prep that if the camera has to be operated, they hire an operator or a DP who will operate. You don't want a commercial house basically not hiring anyone to work the cameras in the hope that someone will secretly do it anyway, saving them the money of not hiring someone. It's silly, they wouldn't expect the director to jump in and apply make-up to the actors because someone said in prep that there wasn't going to be any make-up but it turned out to be needed. Otherwise, why bother doing the commercial under a union contract? Though if anyone was going to get into trouble, it was the production company, not Justin personally if he wasn't a member of the union.

The general approach is lighting that from center camera position is cross-keyed from upstage (3/4 cross backlight) and a lot of front light, so that from the side cameras, the faces are 3/4 keyed by what is a cross backlight to the center camera. Then accent lights for furniture, window lights, etc. And a day and night scheme. Smaller areas on the set like a kitchenette in the corner might just get a soft box overhead, plus any acting areas that are so close to the walls that they can't be cross backlit and are too deep upstage to get enough of the front light.

If you're shooting time lapse essentially, you can record raw for maximum dynamic range, then batch convert the stills.

There’s an old article by Mark Woods suggesting to shoot under magenta light instead of red and then time it later to red to get better sharpness.

Roger has stated issues with stock and processing, not with his camera.

I think so, it looks like a 3/4 back with a low 3/4 front low key to wrap, which is creating the nose shadow and is being reflected in the left third of the eyes.

The eye light is not frontal, it’s basically the key on his face from 3/4 and low, so 1/4 is unlit, creating the shadow.

If you center the crosshairs in the viewfinder and zoom in and out with a zoom lens, you’d find out how the lens mount is centered.

Shoot a framing chart and look at the negative, you will see whether it is centered or not.

You said “Academy is 1.37 so you could extract up to 2.74 from N35 with 2x anamorphic lenses.” Which implies they would extract 2.55 from within Academy, but you meant you could extract 2.55 from a full aperture gate even if centered for Academy, not that they’d extract 2.55 within Academy or within N35.

Most modern 35mm cameras just have Super-35 / Full Aperture gates and if you order one set-up for standard 2.40 35mm anamorphic 4-perf, then the gate is centered (or offset) for Academy (sound projection). So in theory you are exposing a 2.66 : 1 image on the negative but you are only composing for and using a 1.20 : 1 area to get a 2.40 image. If you want, you can insert a 1.20 : 1 mask into the gate on a Panaflex or some Arris. What I'm saying is that "La La Land" wanted a wider image than 2.40 so they were more likely to extract 2.55 from the Full Aperture gate than extract one from within a Normal 35mm / Academy gate or area, which would have meant both cropping the sides of Full Aperture but also the top & bottom of Full Aperture to get 2.55. There's no reason to do that if the gate is exposing Full Aperture, you just need to crop the sides from 2.66 down to 2.55.