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Winter bedroom interior


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I have been trying to get this scene for a while now! I'm hopeless with lighting set-ups and I'd appreciate some help.

The scene is set at about 8am in a bedroom in deepest winter (so still dark). Outside the bedroom window is a streetlight (kind of orange). I started the sequence with an exterior shot so I'd like to keep some continuiety.

I was thinking lighting it mostly blueish with an orange light behind a piece of board where I've cut strips to duplicate blinds. This should give me a nice colour contrast.

 

The room is about 20ftx10ft. White walls.

The main character is waking up from sleep. He's wearing a yellow t-shirt, and I would like this to show on the film against the blue background.

I have light gels and some lights. I work for a TV company and I have access to some lighting equiptment you see.

 

How do I position the lights to get an exposure yet not blast out the darkness?

The film is being shot on Super8, with a canon 814 AZ. If I can get away with it I'd like to use Kodakrome 40.

 

Can anyone give me some advice?

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The trick is to not overlight the white room. You have to decide how bright the dusk is outside because you can't have both the streetlamp and the dusk at the same brightness or it will get messy and overlit and confusing as to the main source of light.

 

Try and keep most of your lighting coming from the outside so as to keep the room darker. Play things against the light and windows to increase the amount of darkness in the frame.

 

I had a location in "Northfork" (a classroom / orphanage) where I had to block the real background outside the windows (a busy street) so I used blinds over the windows and then put big white griflons outside to block the view and white it out. In one scene, I did not put any light on the griflon, letting them go dull grey on film, and then backlit over the top of them (above the frame line). This created a dusky look outside the windows but still gave me light falling into the room from the window direction.

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Thanks man. However why does my camera always seem to give me a under exposed meter reading in these circumstances?

I really am an amateur here so indulge me. Is this correct - I zoom in to the area i want then take it's exposure setting and, as long as its ok i dont worry about the drop off to darkness on the other zones.

Is this right? The camera has a fairly fast lens f1.4, yet the overall scene is under exposed by the meter.

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>I zoom in to the area i want then take it's exposure setting

 

That's the normal method, basically turning the camera into a spot meter. But of course the reflectance of the object will have to be taken into account. You zoom into a white patch of snow, it will try to underexpose the snow so that it is gray, not white. You zoom into a black bowling ball, it will overexpose trying to make the bowling ball gray.

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I had a location in "Northfork" (a classroom / orphanage) where I had to block the real background outside the windows (a busy street) so I used blinds over the windows and then put big white griflons outside to block the view and white it out.

Hey David, how many stops did you over expose the griflon? I'm guessing 3-3 1/2...one more, what stock was it?

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I didn't measure it -- when I wanted them white, I pumped whatever HMI's I had on them -- the blinds over the windows cut down any flare. You can actually see the griflon billowing in the wind outside the window in one scene where Claire Forlani is looking out. Nowadays I would have used an UltraBounce instead of a Griflon -- no plasticy sheen to deal with.

 

I balance a lot of things by eye. For the late "dusk" scene where Darryl Hannah sits next to the boy in bed, I didn't put any light on the griflons and let real skylight spill over the top of them into the room, so I had a soft backlight on the bed but dimmer light on the background. Then I keyed them with a tungsten lamp as if it were the table lamp.

 

I used Fuji F-400T and some light smoke, plus a 1/4 ProMist in those scenes.

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David, a question came to mind after watching the Northfork DVD:

 

A lot of the scenes where you have those lovely shafts of hard light coming in through the windows, yet you can still see some detail out the windows, did you just place your unit outside the house (obviously) and above the frame line (that we see through the window)?

 

That seems like a fairly logical way to do this, yet some of the beam angles seems like the unit was much lower (at window level). Did you just place a large unit at window height, and just let it burn out?

 

Kevin Zanit

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For the homestead house scenes with the gypsies/ghosts, I used 6K HMI PAR's or a 2K Xenon for the beams. I lit the room to about f/4 on F-125T so the background seemed to hold detail.

 

In the room on top of the ark house, I did put a double net scrim over the windows to cut down flare. That was F-400T and lit to around f/8 in most shots (used an ND gel to cut down the depth of field in the close-ups which caused a problem: the gel was not inserted properly and created a hard matte slicing at a diagonal angle on the bottom of the frame, which required that that one person's close-ups be optically blown-up to remove.)

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David,

 

You always lighted by eye or this is something you learned with expirience? I usually measure different sources because I want to ge an exact stop on each light (stops I planed before) but now I am trying to avoid this procedure because of the time it takes....

Miguel

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I cant speak for David, but I can speak for myself (and many DPs I have spoken with).

 

Generally speaking lighting by eye comes with experience. More than anything it is actually the confidence to not meter every source that causes one to not find it necessary to meter every source and still sleep at night until seeing the dailies from the previous day ;)

 

If I don't need a specific stop for a particular reason, I will choose a key source that will place my stop in the range I like to work in (close to wide open). I can then rough in the rest of the sources (if any) by eye.

 

So mainly balancing out the sources can be done by eye fairly easily, but I take a reading for my key. I may spot meter certain objects that concern me, but not to heavily. I tend to set my stop based on incident readings and then work from there with a spot meter.

 

Things I have always found important to spot meter are hair lights, because the reflectiveness of the hair could throw my eye.

 

Also, as the day goes on my eyes can get tired, so I start metering more.

 

I also will sometimes use a contrast viewing glass to give me a quick idea where I am at as I get more tired.

 

The best thing is to do what works for you. Someone once said to me "I always judge a good DP by if he uses a spot meter" I said "Funny, I judge one by what he puts on screen". In other words: no one gives a poop how you get that picture up there, they care what the picture looks like. There is no right or wrong way, just your way.

 

 

 

Kevin Zanit

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Hi,

 

Now I shoot very little of anything other than video, but I'd appreciate being told if I'm an idiot or not based on this:

 

The human eye is really bad at judging absolute brightness, since the image is controlled and processed in ways of which we are not consciously aware, particularly the fact that the eye has very competent auto iris. Therefore it would be necessary to meter the key light to ensure correct exposure.

 

However, the human eye is extremely good at judging relative brightness, so once that key was set, you should be able to set everything else as a relative value more or less by eye. Only if you were particularly concerned about having an area absolutely clip out to white or ensure that a certain unwanted object was completely obscured in shadow would it be necessary to meter other lighting, other than as a confidence check.

 

Am I a moron, or is this roughly how it works?

 

Phil

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That sounds right to me -- well-trained eyes can balance color and brightness levels by eye for the most part. It gets harder when working in overall very high light levels though -- for example, for you lit an interior with big HMI's to f/11, it can be hard to judge the amount of fill light without metering because there seems to be light everywhere.

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Phil you're essentially correct, although I do find that with time I can judge pretty closely what my key light is giving me. If I haven't worked in a while then I'll rely on my meter more on the first feww days on a shoot, but by the end of a large job such as a four week feature, I can walk into a room and guess the brightness to within 1/3 of a stop.

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I agree, the cinematographer's eye is very good at judging RELATIVE brightness, i.e., the tonality of the scene and its lighting. Very few people can judge ABSOLUTE luminance, other than by experience with similar situations. That's why we have exposure meters.

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Ok I've done the scene and well, it didn't work!! I should probably move this thread to the beginners section!

Everything looked too well lit.

I decided to film a new exterior establishing shot with a sleezy red neon sign outside the window, so on the interior I used red gels.

I filmed it at f2.8 roughly, but it was too bright.

 

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? I want a look of very dark yet still just enough to see my character. So lots of shadows.

 

I used an Arri 800W and two Arri 500w as my main light sources. These were diffused by a large reflector. I also used some small ambient light sources to achieve backlights etc.

 

Would anyone suggest just using the ambient sources to get the look I want?

 

It is filmed on Super8 by the way.

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I would be very careful using reflected light for a night interior, unless you can use the window frame as your cutter or some deep eggcrates to control the spill.

 

Reflected light will scatter (didn't you say the walls were light?) and fill in all of the shadow (black) areas. A cheap trick for night work is to key through the window as you would for day, but DONT fill at all, even use negative fill. Often the difference between night and day is the amount of fill and a bit of colour shift.

 

You shot at T2.8? so maybe 10% of your room should have been at this level, I'd say your ambient should have been around T1.0 for that exposure, sound like you may have exposed too much for the ambient? If it read T2.8 on your meter I'd have thought you should have been exposing between T5.8 - T.8. At those levels though its hard to start judging by eye too well, so I would have knocked the sources way back

 

Its hard to give advise without actually seeing the set to be honest - there is no 'night' formula.

 

Could you maybe post a frame from your rushes?

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