I work on an unscripted show where we primarily shoot exterior interviews but occasionally will move inside and use a window as our background when the weather is bad. I’d like to be able to ND the window to reduce the amount of light needed on talent and am thinking of having a couple of wood frames built out of 1x3 strips of lumber so we could quickly drop in different levels of ND. Being that the window is only a couple feet behind talent (out of focus but barely), is this a good approach or would we see lots of reflections, etc.?
We don’t have time to apply the gel directly to the window as the light changes frequently, and don’t have the budget to get hard NDs. I think a large net would be too close and in-focus to disappear completely. We also can’t drop a polarizer for the camera to mitigate reflections because talent always wears sunglasses. The window is always shaded, however, so we’ve had no reflection issues with the glass itself.