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Daylight exterior in the forest with no lights


Albion Hockney

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Hey Guys, I have a shoot coming up doing day exterior in a forest, i have some ideas of how I want to approach it already but I'm really curious what other peoples expereinces have been and if they have any references to share.

 

 

My biggest concern is the high contrast, we are shooting on a RED and with deep shadow and sun spots in the forest I am really worried about the contrast handling.

 

Orginally my plan was to do this very natrually and bring out a 12x of ultra bounce and shiny board and find clearing where we could make sure the 12x would get exposure to the sun to bounce fill into frame but that looks like it might be difficult to do. We scouted the forest yesterday and it looks like there are kinda clearings with enough space to get the 12x up but I think the light hitting it will be pretty patchy and I don't know if it will really do much without full expsoure to the sun. The other option of course would be to convince the producer to get us a geny and a M40 or something but I really wanted to avoid that on this one.

 

 

just curious if anyone has had any good expereince shooting with natrual light in the forest or has any references at hand from films. I want to creat a natrualistic asthetic and high contrast/having the talent underexposed is all good as long as the highlights arn't clipping and I keep enough shadow detail.

 

 

 

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Depends on what your coverage is gonna be. I did one forest day exterior that was mostly handheld following the actors around and was able to get away with using the hard side of one 3x3 bead board for most of it, playing the actors in back and sidelight. Anything wider than a medium shot I used only natural light. Used a 4x4 Half Soft Frost for static CUs when the light got a little too frontal. Even then, the hard frontal light ended up looking pretty good so a lot of times I just went with it. It certainly helps to have beautiful talent and a great makeup artist. I also had an M18, Joker 400, and 3K genny but only used them when we got in the dark woods and lost the light.

 

But we didn't have any dialogue so I rarely had to maintain a lighting setup for hours in changing light.

 

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thanks guys that helps.... yea this is a fashion film and the production is a lot like yours satsuki kinda running around. but there is some more planned out wider stuff that I want to be able to control a bit more I think that reason to bring out the 12x.

 

Nice to see those images nice frame of reference to have I think we can get away with a bit more then I thought. We are going back on another location scout with a tighter shot list. I'm thinking instead of bringing out frames if we can contain the production maybe I can just canopy an area actually with 1/4 grid or something and just shoot.

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You can sometimes stretch a double net scrim or even combine that with camouflage net to knock down the amount of hot spots over the actors.

 

A double net is also very good for maintaining continuity. The problem with shooting in the clearings of woods is that the sun moves across them much faster than one would think – making it hard to maintain continuity in a dialogue scene without a overhead and lights. For example, I once lit a scene for an indie feature that took place around a campsite surrounded by woods by netting the talent area and throwing dried leaves on top of the net to create foliage break-up. We did this even though the talent area was in full sun because we knew the scene was going to take a while to shoot and our charting of the sun’s path showed the area would be in shade within the hour. So in order to maintain continuity we created shade from the outset. We also figured out where the sun was going to be throughout the day and where it would look best for our establishing wide shot, and lit our close coverage to match.

 

Where the scene consisted mostly of two shots, mostly over the shoulder of one character talking to the second character who was standing with his back to the breakfast campfire with the woods behind him, we decided the scene would look best when the sun had moved into a near back light position for him. Since we were shooting under the double net with leaves we didn’t need lights any bigger than a 4k Par. The 4k was heavily diffused and positioned so that it gave the talent facing the camera the most attractive modeling. We also positioned a 1.2kw Par without diffusion where the sun would be when we would shoot the wide so that there would be a consistent edge throughout the scene.

 

When the time came to shoot the establishing shot, the shadow of the overhead frame and stands were thrown forward and did not interfere with the wider framing. Since we were still shooting under the net, we were wider open on the iris and so our exposure dug into the dark woods and brought out more detail. As an added bonus the smoke from the campfire drifted into the woods, creating shafts of light where the sun broke through the tree canopy. What could easily have been a disjointed scene without continuity, turned into a beautifully lit scene, and was accomplished without a lot of amps. The whole scene was lit with nothing more than a 4k and 1.2k Par and powered by nothing more than a 60A/120 circuit from a modified 7500W Honda EU6500is. To record dialogue without picking up the sound of the generator, we ran several hundred feet of 30A/250V twist-lock cable from the generator to set and used a step-down transformer/distro to boost the voltage to compensate for line loss over the long cable run. The Honda EU6500is is so quiet that running it at that distance was all the attenuation needed.

 

Guy Holt, Gaffer, ScreenLight & Grip, Lighting Rental & Sales in Boston

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Thanks Guy, we don't have continuty issues really so luckily I get to be a bit looser for the most part which is nice.

 

A question though, can you run a 2.5K off a honda 3000EU?

 

Depends on the type of ballast. Use this link to a table of the typical load of each type of ballast. The Honda EU3000is is rated for 25A max and 23.3A continuous.

 

Guy Holt, Gaffer, ScreenLight & Grip, Lighting Rental & Sales in Boston

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