Film Lighting

by Kris Malkiewicz

  Janusz Kaminski, cinematographer

  Another thing that is introduced to the motion pictures photography is the idea of umbrella lights. Briese makes light in different sizes, some huge umbrellas in diameters of a few meters with one bulb inside. It is a light focusable by bringing the globe closer or further from the umbrella. They make them in tungsten or daylight and the globes are from 1200 to 6000 watts. There are also some very small handheld umbrellas and I use them frequently for an eye light. An electrician will walk with an actor and you can dim the light down when the actor comes closer.

  The soft quality of bounced light is similar to diffused light and so are the problems of controlling it. For a lighthearted comedy, when the light illuminates the whole set, the task is easy. But when a more dramatic situation occurs and the intention is to light it soft yet with several areas kept at low key, it requires skill and time to do it right with bounced and diffused light. You need to work with big flags and teasers, which are large frames with black cloth stretched on them, and you need space to be able to position reflecting boards at a proper distance and angle. Angle is very important to provide modeling for the faces and to avoid unwanted light spills on the walls.

  B2Pro Collapsed Umbrella

  (courtesy of Brent Langton, B2Pro)

  There is a practical point to remember when controlling such light sources. All flags and scrims used to modulate the distribution of light should be positioned in front of the diffusion screen and not between the lamp and the screen. After all, in a situation like this, the diffusion material becomes the effective light source to be controlled. Another principle to remember is that the softer the light, the larger the flags needed to control it.

  Behind a large diffusion screen, one can combine several hard lights as a super source. The light quality will be better if these lamps are farther away from the diffusion material, but the intensity of the transmitted light will then decrease.

  Ambient Light

  Available light in an area, coming from all directions, is known as ambient light. With faster film emulsions and video receptors, ambient light plays an even more important role in lighting the scene.

  When the scrim is used to modulate the distribution of a diffused light, it should be positioned between the diffusion and the subject being lit.

  Low-key effect is created by the use of one hard light source and predominant shadows. The lighter part of the face is played against a dark background. (Sophie’s Choice, Nestor Almendros, ASC, cinematographer)

  (© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)

  Robert Jason, gaffer

  With today’s film latitude the hard light hitting the floors and the walls quite often really gives you all the ambience that you need. It is actually a very natural look. And if you need more, you can maybe bounce a little light into the ceiling, or put a fill light over the camera, whatever you need. In general I just don’t feel that you need all that ambient light like we used to years ago when a third or a half of a stop of exposure meant something. The hard light hitting natural surfaces gives you all the ambient light that you need.

  Ian Kincaid, gaffer

  When we did Inglourious Basterds in Berlin, in the set the soft top light would generally be provided by the 4 × 8 ft. softboxes, just giving an ambient glow. It is an architecture light more than anything else. And then if there is a group of people sitting at the table, we’ll “hammer” the table with some light or put the PAR globes bashing down light and let the ambience glow up. Then we’ll add the strong backlight. Generally you try to let the room light itself in a natural way. You put lighting through the windows, the light comes up off the floor and off the furniture; we’ll throw muslin on the floor, unbleached or bleached depending upon whether we want it to be warm or not.

  Low Key, High Key

  One of the most decisive factors creating the visual mood through lighting is the use of contrast and light distribution in the styles known as low key and high key. These styles should not be confused with hard and soft lighting, though there are many parallels and similarities.

  In a low-key scene the majority of the picture is underlit, but some parts are correctly exposed or even overexposed. If, for example, there is a shot of a prisoner in a dark cell, perhaps a small window in the upper corner will be quite bright and one-quarter of his face will be correctly exposed, but the remainder of the frame will be a few stops underexposed and no fill light will be used. The result is an overall impression of low key because the eye compares the dark areas with the few that are well lit.

  The candle scene is in low key but with an upbeat mood. Lighting comes at an angle approximating the candlelight. Streetlight patterns outside the windows provide more depth and separation of the planes. (Sophie’s Choice, Nestor Almendros, ASC, cinematographer)

  (© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)

  Underexposing all the areas would lead to a murky picture without sufficient contrast and visual impact. We have to remember that it is by comparison of brightnesses and shadows that our eyes comprehend the lighting values in the frame. As many cinematographers state, “What you do not light is often more important than what you do light.” In black-and-white pictures the brightness range is all there is. In color, the hues and saturation will also contribute to the overall gradation.

  High key represents the opposite concept. Here most of the frame is well lit with a lot of soft fill light. Sets are rather light in color. If the heavy shadows of low key are intended to introduce an element of suspense, the shadowless high key leaves nothing to the audience’s imagination.

  Studio Versus Location

  The actual painting with light, creating the three-dimensional composition to be ultimately recorded on the two-dimensional film, has to be approached differently in the studio and on location. The challenge of a dark stage holds an immense appeal for some cinematographers.

  The same room as in the candle scene is lit to a high-key effect with strong daylight outside the windows and rather flat lighting of the actors. (Sophie’s Choice, Nestor Almendros, ASC, cinematographer)

  (© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)

  Conrad Hall, ASC

  Starting on a dark stage is the most wonderful, joyful evolvement ever, and it is just a metaphor of what all life should be like. It is as if you are coming into a problem that you have to face, and there it is, like a life to live. What are you going to do? You have choices to make. It is not like there is one way to do it, so you have to figure out how to make those choices. I have gone about it starting with a concept. A concept gives you enough information to start talking to somebody else that you are working with, because at this point you are going into a teamwork operation. So, the concept has to be spoken, articulated, and everyone on the crew has to be imbued with that concept. Now we are all working with one concept instead of everybody working with his own idea. And I am working with the director’s concept, and then come a lot of discussions, because sometimes you know just how to do it and sometimes you don’t.

  In the past, the studio setting that offered filmmakers total control was often blamed for an unrealistic treatment of the story material.

  James Plannette, gaffer

  When you are shooting a night street scene on a back lot, everything looks too perfect. You get on a back lot of some studio, and you have big lights and towers, and you have everything you want, and so you end up shooting at f/4 instead of at f/2.8, and so the headlights do not look the same and the neon signs in the windows don’t look so bright as they look when you shoot real exterior, and everybody has a perfect key light, because you have lights on top of the buildings and you’ve got the towers and all of a sudden it is the studio. So even if you are shooting on a back lot, pretend that you are not. That is the prob
lem in the studio with scaffolds and lights on them, that everybody has a backlight: that says studio.

  Some filmmakers find the limitations of location shooting more reassuring.

  James Crabe, ASC

  When working in sets, you are creating everything yourself from the ground up. It is all artificial. When you are going to a natural location, walking through the door, you are aware of where you can put the camera and where you cannot. You are affected psychologically by the lighting of the place when you see it in the natural situation. You may try to emulate that. It is a lot different from coming to a studio where, the grips can tell you, any wall can come out, everything is wild, you can shoot anything you want to shoot. Some directors like the control, being able to design everything, and a lot of directors are terrified of that aspect and prefer to let the natural aspects of the location dictate the staging.

  There is no question that the studio allows for much more precise and sophisticated lighting.

  Conrad Hall, ASC

  In the studio, you have total control. I love the distance that you can have from your lights because I hate to see somebody walking close to a wall with a larger-than-life shadow of himself. That means that the light source is very close. But in the studio, when you can have your light source thirty or forty feet away, an actor can walk anyplace in the room and he does not burn up when he walks to a window.

  Of course some location interiors are so vast that they combine the best of both worlds: space and authenticity. Irrespective of the type of interior where the scene takes place, the cinematographer has to decide on the look of it.

  Lighting for Multiple Cameras

  One of the frequent specifics of contemporary film productions is the multicamera coverage of the scene. Particularly in HD productions, where the recording medium cost is minimal, it makes sense to cover the scene from many angles and preserve the spontaneity of the performance.

  Slawomir Idziak, PSC

  Contemporary films are often shot with multiple cameras. Camera rentals are comparatively not very expensive, with digital technologies the recording medium is almost free, so thinking in terms of single-camera technique starts being nonsensical. All that was connected with a single-camera staging, like the reverse angles, is slowly abandoned now. On the set of King Arthur I had seventeen cameras. The new moviemaking will be very dynamic. Using multiple cameras gives more freedom of improvisation to the actors. Ridley Scott describes it well when he says that by using multiple cameras, he acquires additional space because the possibilities of cutting, the dynamics of shooting, allow him to put more accents, to interpret a scene in a more aggressive manner. This technique forces cinematographers to make certain compromises in lighting. But this certain harshness in lighting that automatically comes with the multiple-camera technique can take you by surprise in a positive way.

  Dion Beebe, ASC

  For multiple cameras, I cannot take the same approach as with a single camera. I still tend to let my A camera lead what I am doing. So I’ll compose and light mostly for the A camera, but of course never forgetting that I’ll be running a second or third camera. As I’ve gotten into multiple cameras, I have found lighting from the floor to be very useful, placing units just below the frame line or bouncing bigger units off the floor to create a low, soft bounce in the room. This allows cameras to cross-shoot, avoiding fixtures and allowing me to still have some shadow and contrast on all my shots.

  Robert Baumgartner, cinematographer and gaffer

  When directors want to shoot a scene at the same time with multiple cameras, it can cause an immense problem for lighting. It is extremely difficult and near impossible to light for every angle. It is not so problematic when you use a tight and a wide shot from the same angle, but it is increasingly common to position cameras at opposing angles for medium and close-up shots, and that becomes very complicated to light. A DP’s nightmare is a director’s and actor’s dream. Instead of placing the off-camera actor next to the camera for eye line, both actors are live on film at the same time. This allows both the director and the actors more opportunity to work the scene. Though it is painful and more often than not a compromising lighting situation, we have to devise clever ways to make the most of this. In the end it is not about one craft or another, it is how each gives to the creative process and films the best story possible. I’ve been fortunate in my career as a gaffer and now as a DP to be in a lot of multiple-camera and handheld 360° lighting situations, and as a result I trained my eye to look at a set and try to give the director and actors the most physical and visual space possible. If they can walk onto a set and cannot see a light, a grip stand, or a flag and I’ve managed to light the scene in concert with the film’s vision, I have contributed my best.

  Matthew Libatique, ASC

  I made a decision that light doesn’t have to be flat when you are using multiple cameras. You just have to choose which camera is going to have shadow and which camera is going to have light. And then, if you light with extreme contrast, you will have many opportunities to frame good lighting, especially with a director who is more interested in getting coverage for the sake of cutting from different angles than in getting one beautiful angle. I embraced this concept because it was naturalistic to me, like three photographers photographing something that existed in the same time.

  I have to first establish what kind of director I am lighting for. One type of director will give me a frame and I am lighting for this frame. This is very specific. But for many cameras, I am lighting an environment and then finding the light with the frame. To make this distinction, one of the first things to determine is, What type of filmmaker am I working with?

  I guess my thought process is, How will the light travel naturally within the scene and space? With today’s film stocks you can almost see how the light will be interpreted. You know what it is. If it is the Tweenie, you know what it is. If it is a 2K soft, you know what it is; if it is a Kino, you can tell, because the stocks are so insanely sensitive.

  Lighting for Digital Video

  As the high-definition cameras achieve better and better dynamic range, the lighting for film and for digital video is coming closer together. Cinematographers and gaffers keep adjusting to this changing situation.

  James Plannette, gaffer

  My limited experience with lighting for HD is that the lighting isn’t any different. You have to be careful with the contrast; you have to be careful with the highlights; sometimes it digs into the shadows more than you would like. You probably expose more like you were shooting transparency (reversal) than if you were shooting a negative film. You don’t overexpose the way you do with negative. You expose correctly or maybe even slightly under, to hold the highlights. But lighting is still an important aspect of storytelling, just as costumes and production design are. You can take an HD camera and go to an existing location and make your movie, but then the production design is not helping to tell the story. It is all a part of getting the audience enthralled with the story you are telling, with the sound and the production design and the lighting. I discussed it with production managers and associate producers who have done budgets both for HD and film, and I find that there are no savings whatsoever and that the HD may be costing more for getting technicians and all the equipment necessary. Sometimes there may be a saving in postproduction, because maybe it goes to the postproduction part earlier. But it is not an economic decision. One of the advantages of HD that the directors really like is that you can shoot for a longer period of time without reloading. And so often the reloading comes at just the most inopportune time. Just when an actor is really getting in the rhythm of the scene, all of a sudden the camera assistant says, “I have to reload.” And it just breaks the mood.

  Rodrigo Prieto, ASC

  Each digital camera has its own characteristics. When you shoot on film, you learn the specific attributes of the different film stocks and emulsions, and you light accordingly. The same applies if you are doing speci
al processing, like bleach bypass, which I used on some of my films, or cross process, pushing, or pulling; all these are methods of controlling the image for a specific result. Digital is yet another medium, so you have to know the way the sensor of each camera behaves and work within the parameters of latitude and color depth of the digital camera. On State of Play I used the Genesis camera for the scenes representing the world of politics because I felt its look seemed closer to the way we see politicians on television. The rest of the movie was shot on film with anamorphic lenses.

  Dion Beebe, ASC

  Elements of digital photography are, at this time, still somewhat experimental. This will all change in the coming years as the digital format goes through an almost weekly evolution. Collateral was a combination of digital and film, the principle being that all the night exteriors were digital and all the interior work was 35mm film. With Miami Vice we did some tests and what Michael Mann fell in love with was the vividness of the digital during the daytime. For Michael the driving force is the visual nuance of the image. What he is trying to communicate is almost tactile and completely visceral. Digital for him with Collateral was capturing the night, and that was his fascination, and with Miami Vice it was really in some ways with capturing the day. Those dramatic skies in Florida in the summertime, the cloud formations shooting around a stop of T/22 on a tiny chip, in the middle of the day, creates unbelievable depth. You can place a camera inches from your actors’ faces and never lose a sense of the environment beyond them. We fell in love with that, that incredible presence and immediacy of the format.