Advice on keeping exterior consistency

[Jeremy Montana]

I would appreciate any advice, tips, or tricks on shooting daylight exteriors over the course of a few production days related to keeping the daylight consistent for a long scene.

 

Thank you.

[Chris Keth]

Well, the basic idea is to shoot the master at whatever time of day the scene is supposed to take place during. Then, for the tighter stuff you can cheat the light direction by using your own fixtures, shinyboards, et cetera. Usually, the background is out of focus enough that the direction of the light is unclear.

 

Some special circumstances creep up like sunset scenes where the direction of light is extreme and the color is a big part of the look. You can still cheat these but it's trickier. Usually you would have to use some lens filtration to help cheat the overall color and then warm up the keylights for your talent to help get the effect. Shinyboards can get the direction of sunset light but in some locations, you may not be able to cheat the backgrounds since late day shadows are blatently wrong or some such.

[Bob Hayes]

Backlight Backlight Backlight

[Adrian Sierkowski]

If you're over multiple days too, it really might help to have a DSLR around to grab reference shots of how things looked too.

[Tony Brown]

Backlight Backlight Backlight

 

Agreed.

 

If only choosing locations where that easy.

[Tim Fabrizio]

Agreed.

 

If only choosing locations where that easy.

 

Got me. I completely thought there was a bug on my screen. Nice one.

[Adrian Sierkowski]

I expect you to clean the finger prints off my screen from trying to squash that bug!

[Serge Teulon]

Hey Jeremy,

 

I finished a film yesterday in Maidstone, Kent. In case you don't know, that is the nearest south eastern county from London.

The day was a mixture of sun in the morning, to an afternoon which consisted of constant changes. These spanned between showers, heavy dark clouds and broken sun. Additionally, the daylight in the afternoon at this time of the year in England, only really lasts about 3 hours to shoot in.

 

Due to the nature of the story, which requested for an overcast day, I shot the CU's of faces in the morning with some 12x12 light grid and put up muslin in the opposite side. This was done on the tight end of a primo 24-275 zoom. The afternoon consisted of all other shots.

 

We were shooting on 35 with no lights.

 

It was a nightmare and we just about got away with it.

What really helped was keeping a very close eye on the met office reports and also knowing in advance my north, south, east and west.

[Nathan Martin]

a little trick ive used before is to keep a pola in the whole time, and adjust it to get the right blue in the sky. This worked well for some things but if your shooting anything with reflective surfaces it can become a bit of a headache trying to get rid of the reflections and keep a consistant sky at the same time.

 

the really hard part is trying to remember the blue you were getting the day before and matching it.

 

obviously this doesnt make the subjects lighting match, but by keeping the sky consistent, it does help the feeling of consistency.

 

on the other hand, i dont really like very blue sky's unless theyre needed. theryre very distracting.

[Jeremy Montana]

Thank you all for your responses.