I took over on Collateral. This project started with Paul Cameron. I came in when they were two weeks or so into the production. I had never shot digital prior to this. When I started, the first thing I did was toss out my light meter. We were working at light levels that were way off the scale, working as we were with a very extended sensitivity curve, which is like working with a hypersensitive electronic film stock. It was like every artifice that we usually get away with, that we simply introduce and accept, at that level of extreme sensitivity felt like a light. Sometimes you add a very soft kick or backlight or sidelight. On this format, however, it felt like I was just overlighting the subject. So that became a real education for me. I took my sources and practically turned them into light panels, wrapping them in layers and layers of diffusion. The mandate became balancing our light levels to the background, balancing everything to the night exterior, to the existing ambience of the night. It was a different way of working led by the fact that for the first time we could capture a level of illumination at night that we had never captured before.
On the interiors, I think there is a texture to that electronic image capturing which is different. I tend to use soft sources anyway, but with interiors you almost want to just let light envelop the subject, it wants to feel almost molded to it. Because otherwise if you start to add anything with too much of an edge, it feels artificial. I think it has to do with the electronic nature of the image. The digital texture, which is expressed in pixels—when you take that image and scan it to film you naturally reintroduce film grain and texture, giving it certain film characteristics. But when I am in a room looking at the high-def monitors and lighting, you just want the light to really mold to the characters. That said, we took the big shootouts in Miami Vice and we really made a decision to go with hard light, a sort of chiaroscuro approach which became a dramatic choice. I think ultimately you always have this creative choice.
I tend to work closely with the on-set painter, whether we’re using film or digital. With digital, he almost needs to be glued to my side through that process. On Collateral we developed with the painter an aging mixture with which he could go and hit things like headlights of cars, spectral highlights on windshields, just all these things that when you look at the frame would be distracting due to the digital format’s struggle with highlights. Whereas on film oftentimes a highlight would just naturally burn out, on digital it would create strange electronic artifacts. It is a challenge, this high end of the curve. You have to monitor it, and the standby painter becomes very much your ally in controlling it.
I think digital cinematography is very exciting. It’s a new tool, with new storytelling potential. In the end, as with film, it’s how you use it.
Russell Carpenter, ASC
The film 21 was shot on the Panavision Genesis HD camera. I knew that I was going into a project which I had to shoot in extremely low light levels in the Vegas casinos if I didn’t want to overwhelm the colorful ambient energy of light on the casino floors with “exposure” light needed to get to a certain level. The energy of the casinos, the crazy colors and wavelengths, the squiggly colors that you get—I didn’t want that to go away. I wanted that neon “unnatural” energy to be a character in the film, a character that would feel very different from Boston. A short test made me feel that the Genesis was a good tool to use. I treated it as though it was a film camera but with a waveform monitor as a light meter. I had a lot of dialogue with the digital imaging technician, Doug Degrazzio. I said, “OK, this looks burned out, but am I going to get it back in DI or not?” And he would take me to the waveform monitor and he would say, “We’ll be able to get that back,” or, “No, that’s gone, forget it.” And sometimes I would say, “Great, I don’t care if this comes back or not.”
I learned from other people that different digital acquisition systems have different characteristics. Some see into the shadows better than the Genesis does; some record highlights better. But it turned out for me that I could replicate a beautiful film look and that’s what mattered. We didn’t have much time to test in prep, so we set up the lookup tables and we replicated the look of 5218 (film emulsion), but then we treated it a little bit to crush the blacks on the monitor that I was looking at. So even if the detail in the blacks went away slightly, I would know that in the raw mode that detail was still there. So I built in a little protection for myself that served me very well on that shoot. What I did learn was that sometimes even though the waveform monitor and the digital imaging technician said, “Oh, that information is there,” when I went to the digital intermediate step, yes, the information was there in the shadow areas, but it sort of wanted to clump up when I tried to bring it out, whereas you would probably get a much smoother gradation in film because of the nicer “toe” (the shadow part of the exposure curve) that film stock has. When I tried to lift the information in digital intermediate, it sort of came up as one big chunk. We found out that certain reds popped more than we wanted, but sometimes we used that to our advantage. That was a learning curve for me, because I like warm light. I would use warm light, but in certain instances it would go warmer on the faces than I wanted it to, and in certain instances I would have to put power windows on the faces of the actors in the digital suite and dial some of that warmth out, because they were going a little too orangey. With film you might see more nuances of warm light but with the Genesis there were not so many nuances.
I think the Genesis is a great tool and I wouldn’t hesitate to use it again. And yet one has to be careful. Like any medium, it has its pluses and minuses. I rated the Panavision Genesis at around 400 ASA. Another wonderful thing about Genesis is the 360-degree shutter. It is pretty much no shutter at all. You can gain just about a full stop that way. You can also use a little bit of an electronic gain, but I rarely used that because I didn’t want to see noise. I may use a little bit of an electronic gain if I have to.
A wonderful thing about working with Genesis is that you know exactly when you are in or out of focus. At the end of the day, knowing that you have focus on very challenging and difficult shots is tremendous. You can totally tell focus on the large HD screen. It is a different way of working. When I work with a viewfinder, I am in a much more subjective space, having an internal conversation with myself. And then I know what it is and I’ll call my gaffer or a key grip for adjustments. But with the big monitor, you can say to the gaffer, “Look into that corner over there. Could we make it fall off more smoothly?” I actually enjoy working that way.
A lookup table defines a modification to a raw image. You say, “Let’s make this image to look like it was shot on 5218.” Or, “Let’s make it look like it was shot on a low-contrast film.” Or maybe you want to create a cross-processed look. It’s all possible. Ironically, in my experience, digital technology has ensured that we are spending much, much more time in post-production than before. On 21 I probably spent a month to a month and a half on digital intermediate. I think it is a very powerful tool. The one thing that I found in shooting film versus an electronic medium is that the film negative can hold such a plenitude of information that there is much more information to be mined. You can go so many ways with it. I don’t think there is that latitude with the digital image yet. Maybe later. So there is a wonderful thing about shooting film.
I love the DI. I don’t think it excuses bad lighting. I think that lighting will be there. I think it is important to know what you can do later, because very often we are up against time. You may know that in DI later you can take this wall down or brighten that window or put a selective filter on a portion of an actor’s face. Say that on the set, under stringent time considerations, you’ve made the lighting on an actress extremely intricate, but you really wanted to spend twenty-five minutes more on the environment. And you know that you can fix it with the power windows, or if this cushion or piece of furniture here is too dark, you can bring it up later. Making these decisions on the set, you’ve as well as just committed yourself to being
there in the postproduction process. The cinematographer must be on a DI process to protect his work.
Robert Elswit, ASC
I was shooting in an office building in Manhattan on HD and I had an actress sitting at a table and I couldn’t get a balance between the window and the face. Outside was a cityscape and I could never get the light levels in the room up enough. Looking at the film dailies I knew that to see the face and the buildings outside, I would have to go in at post and digitally bring the building down. In digital recording, if you overexpose something, there is nothing there. It is even more limiting than a reversal stock. If you underexpose too much, you will get noise, so you are limited to that contrast range. So all of a sudden I realized that I have to spend an hour building the light level up to see it balanced on the monitor, on the set. In digital, if you do the shadow side of somebody’s face or put somebody in a shadow and you don’t have the light levels up enough, you’ll end up with one shade of gray. You can light to the monitor and still make huge mistakes by the time you release it on film, I think. Instead of the total range that falls off, you end up with one shade of gray because you are just dealing with so much digital noise down there. You’ve got to light flatter to get your contrast and it looks terrible on the monitor. If you light to the monitor, you really have to know what you’re doing.
Chapter Six
Lighting a Scene
In the previous chapter, we dealt with the character and quality of light and with the strategy of establishing lighting directions. Let’s look now at the actual creation and control of light on the set. The unique problems of location lighting will be dealt with in chapter 7.
Lighting Approach to a Scene
In today’s fast ways of shooting films, quick thinking has become one of the very important attributes of a cinematographer. He or she has to be fast at evaluating the opportunities and the limitations of a coming scene.
Hard key light coming from the window as a cross light is balanced by fill light coming from the 750-watt soft light with diffusion. (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.)
(© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC
How do I approach lighting a scene? I always look for the limitations and opportunities. I try to learn which will be the areas where I can’t place lighting, not only on a certain shot but during the coverage of the scene. I try to know in advance what angles we will shoot, what will be in frame for the coverage, and what will be out of frame, and from there I deduce the opportunities I have. I try to get as much information as I can collaborating with the director, so that I can plan ahead and have a lighting strategy to avoid painting myself into a corner, which has happened to me many times. Then I know, OK, my opportunities are, say, to light through this window or from that building over there, or this column where I can hide a light. So I start looking for all the opportunities within the limitations imposed by what the camera sees. I try to be very practical.
The hardest thing is managing time. Many things are going through your mind when you are starting to design the lighting for a scene. What moment is it in the story? What am I expressing with the lighting? What mood I am trying to convey? Where are the practical lighting sources in frame? All these things—hard light or soft light, what color temperature?—you have to make all these decisions very quickly. I always insist on having a moment, a few minutes, to use my imagination; I ask my gaffer and my crew not to start asking me questions immediately. I use this time to figure out a lighting strategy that will allow freedom for the actors and will help create the appropriate atmosphere for the scene.
Once I have seen the rehearsal and I roughly know what the actors will do, I ask the stand-ins to be very close to each other, look down, miss their marks, do these things that actors always do when you are actually shooting. So I try to foresee what the actors may do when the camera rolls, and I do my best to be ready for anything.
Good stand-ins are very helpful to a cinematographer when lighting the scene. Unfortunately, often they are not properly instructed.
Colin J. Campbell, gaffer
So much of our work is now done on distant location. I miss the professional stand-in. It is really a tough job. It requires a lot of concentration. When I start a job, I chat with the stand-ins.
If they haven’t done it before, I give them a brief rundown of the requirements for their job. They need to watch the rehearsal, in particular the actor they are standing in for. What he or she does, where they stand, walk, look, what they do with their hands. After that it is a matter of paying attention and duplicating what they saw in rehearsal.
Dion Beebe, ASC
I always love working at the low end of the curve. When I walk into the room that I have lit, I want the environment to feel right, to possess the atmosphere of the scene. I want the actors to feel that as well. If a scene takes place in a dimly lit room, I will create a dimly lit room rather than manipulate that effect by printing down or controlling the look in post. I need to look at it and it needs to be right. The atmosphere needs to feel right. It is very hard for my focus pullers because I find myself working constantly at a very wide open aperture.
I have done three films now with one gaffer, John Buckley. We discuss what we are going to do. If it is a big set and we know that there will be a requirement for X amount of space lights and silks overhead, those sorts of things I’ll leave to John, because he really understands that. Everything runs through the dimmer board so we can control the level, intensity, and color of all our fixtures. John is masterful at managing huge stages, making a system that for me is user-friendly. When we are on these large sets, I can leave lots of the broad-stroke lighting to him. We will discuss the types of units that we are going to go with, whether they are xenons or 20Ks or Dinos, the type of things that we want to start with. He is great at placement and rigging and really understands light.
Dante Spinotti, ASC
I tend to forget, when I start prepping a movie, whatever I did in a previous one. Only because I think that the material needs every time a different way of seeing things, different sources.
With Michael Mann some of the staging work we do in preproduction. Michael does photo storyboards to which he remains faithful. Sometimes we even go around with a torch light, a flashlight with a xenon, and we check the proper angle for our sources. So you are walking in really knowing what kind of lighting you’ll end up doing. Otherwise, you try to know as much as you can know when you’re scouting, up to the last moment, and you try to prerig; there is some basic stuff that you can do. Nowadays with the new techniques, more powerful machinery, you don’t have to do that much, this process is simplified.
M. David Mullen, ASC
When it is time to light a scene, I stand there and imagine what the room and actors will look like as I move the key light around. I visualize where the shadows are going to fall. And if I foresee a problem, like one actor shadowing the other actor, I consider moving the light versus moving their marks a bit. You see, we usually block with the actors, put tape marks for their positions, and then light the set with stand-ins while the actors go back to the trailers. Sometimes I’ll move the tape marks slightly if I don’t think that it is going to matter to the actors, so they don’t block each other from the camera or from the lighting. So you can cheat like that if it is not going to affect their acting.
Besides visualizing the lighting, I’ll also turn practical room lights on and off, or open and close curtains and blinds, to see the effect on the space and stand-ins. I also consider what will be off camera and whether to key from the easiest positions to hide a light or whether I have to place the key somewhere more difficult to rig or hide because the direction is better. And finally I also think about the eye lines. Is the actor l
ooking frame left mostly? Frame right? It is traditional, even today, to key from the direction the eyes are pointing; i.e., if the actor is looking off screen right, the key should be coming in from screen right. That way the actor’s eyes will catch the light better. I’ve heard it called “lighting from the smart side” versus “lighting from the dumb side,” meaning that the light comes from the direction opposite where the actor is looking. But sometimes it is the only direction you can light from, maybe because the camera, let’s say, pans through the “smart side” so you cannot place a light there. And other times, it may be better to key from the dumb side, like when filming over the shoulders of two people kissing each other. Sometimes when the two noses and then lips get together, the heads just completely block any light coming from the “smart side.” The only light that can hit them now is from the camera side, because that’s the only open side. So either you have to add enough fill light that the actors’ eyes are visible as they shadow each other, or you key from the camera side. Another case would be when dealing with some actress’s hairstyle. Sometimes her hair is falling heavily on the side you would normally hit with the key light, so it may be necessary to key from the opposite side. And finally, if the light is motivated by a practical source that is established as being on the “dumb side,” then you will probably key from that direction even in close-ups where the practical is not visible.
Film Lighting Page 21