Lighting Continuity

[DavidSloan]

Okay so last night I'm on the set and we light a silhoutte shot with 2 actors standing by a small window. Outside we have a baby with plus green and ctb, bounced off a b-board. We also have a sprinkler going for the rain effect, which worked beautifully. During the shot the actor uses a lighter which illuminates his face. We simulated the lighter with an Inkie on a dimmer. The actors start kissing and kneel out of the frame. All in all the shot was beautiful and I was extremely satisfied with it. Then I hear, "for the next shot I want them to continue going down in a low angle unto the bed. I'm like "excuse me? How am I supposed to go from a pure silhoutte, to them kneeling down on a bed (which is against the wall of the window!) and suddenly there is light?" This was a shot the director just pulled out of his ass, on the spot...I wasn't prepared for that. I ended up just going with the obvious of bouncing soft blue light in the room. But how the fcuk is that gonna cut? Has anyone ever dealt with a situation like this..and what did you do?

 

Thanks,

 

Sloan.

[David Mullen ASC]

Often a silhouette means an unlit subject, black, framed against a lit background. So the best way to then SEE the subject is to change the camera angle enough (like 90 degrees) to suggest that now they are being lit by the background lighting from the previous angle. Then you just want to keep enough blackness on the shadow side of the subject so that your eye senses that the contrast is similar to the previous shot -- i.e. you have a similar distribution of tonal values and a good black reference. You also want to have enough of a shot change in editing to hide the change, like coming around to a reverse angle before going to the angle similar to the silhouette shot. But it's always a cheat, sure enough.

 

An HD feature I shot called "Jackpot" had a similar situation -- a long-lens silhouette wide shot of two people standing at the end of a hallway with bright glass doors behind them, cutting to tight close-ups at a right angle where they are naturally now sidelit by the same light source. I tried to use some negative fill to keep the shadow side of their faces dark. My biggest problem was that I had to shoot their close-ups with a wide-angle lens because I was stuck in the short direction of the hallway with no way to back up the camera (no doorways to back into.)

 

Last night I did a silhouette shot partly to get done at the end of a long night. It was a shiny hallway that I backlit by reflecting a 2-bank Kino at the end of the hallway, outside the glass doors, hidden by the center door split frame. It was amazing because these two Kino tubes managed to create a soft glare that ran halfway down a really long hallway with plenty of exposure, just because of the angle of reflection off of the tile walls. Then I turned on a few overhead fluorescents in the far background and had the characters in the foreground silhouette against the Kino glare on the walls. It's one of those shots where you'd be hard-pressed to meter with an incident meter because it's all about reflections with no direct light on the subject. But in this case it was HD and I just exposed by how it looked on the monitor.

[DavidSloan]

Thanks for that very lengthy and thoughtful reply, David. I should have just cheated it *smacks forehead* These are the beautiful things you can only learn on set!

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Specularity can be a killer on video. I have in the past - on that shoot I recently posted a still of, with the wet-down floor - fought against glare off shiny surfaces. If you're trying to see any of the rest of the scene, that is, if you don't want a silhouette, I find it very hard to avoid it blasting completely out and looking like a bad soap opera. What do I do to avoid big reflections looking like a mistake?

 

Phil

[David Mullen ASC]

Well, in some ways, I invite "mistakes" like flare, glare, even clipping, if it makes the shot look more interesting, whether video or film. It helps that the knee circuitry in the F900/3 is pretty good. I was lighting this shiny row of lockers for a day scene and the glare was a bit much, so I used a Pola to cut it back, which helped. I sometimes sneak in an ND grad filter as well. But to some degree, I'd rather have interesting lighting with some artifacts rather than balance things TOO carefully, but I'm sure some people who see my HD work probably think I don't know what I'm doing...

[Guest fstop]

This is one of the things I am not so hot about with video, and that's the instant monitor playback- everyone gathers around and backseat directs out of context, unaware of where the footage is going or what is happening with it.

 

Makes me think of film cameramen from the past doing dark looking underexposed day for night shots- if monitors had exposed where they were trying to go, all you'd get is "I want this", "that's too bright/dark" or "I want that"... I think the mystery and anticipation of photochemical film results, for all of it's gambles and long waits at least keeps everyone shut up until rushes...

 

I was so tempted at points to turn around at the weekend and say "Well why don't YOU shoot the remake?" or just "**** off" when the voices of wisdom, be they the visiting editor or the AD would come over with "their" concerns- of course when you you review the playback at the end of the day, everyone tells you what great work you're doing...

[Bill Totolo]

I'm sure some people who see my HD work probably think I don't know what I'm doing...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I saw Jackpot projected and let me tell you, David knows what he's doing.

 

I recently got the DVD to a short I shot for a director back in December. I shot with the DVX-100. I was shooting a wide shot of a living room. In the living room, mounted about 10 feet high was a small digital projector which was used to project movies on a wall.

 

I was shooting toward the projector and wanted to get some lens flair in my frame. The only way I could get it to flair was by including the lens of the projector in the shot. Of course this was peaking. I did not have a waveform monitor but it must have been way over 100IRE.

 

I just thought the look from the flair outweighed the clipped highlights of the projector.

 

To me it suited the scene. I think it would have been bland without it. It jazzed up the scene a little which was a bit too 'talky' anyway.

 

Long reply, sorry.

[Josh Bass]

Everyone but the DP and director should be forced to wear a collar that would shock the ass out of them if they got anywhere near the monitors. Thank you for your time.

[Sam Wells]

When I first started to do lighting I was a fanatic about eliminating kicks, unwanted specular reflections, carried extra dulling spray, bars of soap.

 

Then one day I screened a lighting test I'd done some time before. And I'm sitting there thinking, this looks better than the scene I actually shot with the same lighting setup. (ie it worked).

What's the difference, well when I did the scene for real, I flagged gobo'd dulled all the so-called unwanted specularity. And it just took the life out of it, I realized in retrospect.

 

Obviously, there are flare and glare etc you want to surpress, but......

 

-Sam

[David Mullen ASC]

For example, I did this master shot in a cafeteria serving area with some small windows in the b.g., which had a 4K HMI shining through as a backlight. But as I was shooting, the REAL sun come over the top of the farther building and I had this intense backlight burning out the window frames in the background. Two of the actors were standing by the windows.

 

When I finally got to their close-ups, the real sun had gone so I used the 4K HMI to recreate the super hot backlight on their necks, clipping the detail. The gaffer asked me if we should scrim down the backlight because it looked so hot, but once you did that and balanced the exposure, it wouldn't have to same feeling as the over-the-top sunlight that flooded in in the master. Plus it looked more like real sunlight being overexposed so much.

 

In another scene in a hallway, I was trying to recreate a shot in an early scene in "The Insider" where out-of-focus in the foreground are some people laughing and chatting, way overexposed so they are sort of blobby white shapes, as you see Russel Crowe in the background packing up his office and leaving. So I used a long lens, put some foreground people that I hit with a 1200 watt HMI PAR with a spot lens, overexposed them until they were clipped, threw them out of focus, and focused on someone in the background. Worked better in "The Insider" still, but I liked the effect anyway...