Let’s say that you are filming a day interior scene and the key naturally comes from a big window and it creates the dominant lighting effect in the scene. My master shot has the window off to one side, side lighting a group of actors standing in a circle. As I move around the circle shooting tighter coverage, some actors will naturally end up being flatly lit because they are facing the window. Now I can either “cheat” in the close-ups by moving the key light or the actor so that they are less frontally lit, or I can keep the light coming from the established direction, frontal, but break it up so it is not as flat or low in contrast. So maybe I’ll put a top cut on the light so that the top of the back wall falls off more, or I’ll put shadows across the body, like a window pattern. So there is still contrast in a frame, but I am keying from the logical direction.
I often remind directors that if the camera is moving in a straight line, in and out, or side to side, I can normally find a place to light from. But when it is doing a long curving move, it gets harder to light (and thus more time-consuming), because you start to reveal more and more of the room as the camera moves and may end up with no off-camera area to light from.
Robert Jason, gaffer
I like to use a larger light than I think I need and scrim it down, because I always feel like I’ve made a mistake if I didn’t have to put at least one double scrim on the light. It is always easy to take a light down, but it is very time-consuming to use the wrong light and then have to replace it with a completely different light. But you cannot get too stuck on a source with hard light, at least you cannot get stuck on one source. You can pick a source but it doesn’t mean that you cannot have multiple lights coming from that source: nobody will know the difference. In fact, it just makes it more beautiful. I like lights that you can control. They have to have a Fresnel lens. I don’t like open-face lights because I think you are lacking control with them. I like to have a Fresnel on the light.
I know that cross lighting is not all that popular in today’s films, but the reality is that it is a very fast and efficient way to light because now you can move the camera in any direction. Maybe you pull diffusion off this light, you put diffusion on that light, and nothing has to move; the lighting works no matter where the camera is and which way the actors turn. With cross lighting, if you put four lights in an X pattern, you don’t even have to turn them all on. Maybe a key light is three-quarters frontal, fill light is also three-quarters frontal, and the two back crosses are the same. You don’t have to turn them all on, but you already have them placed there, and then you can just vary the density and the softness. Personally I think that there is no lighting situation that it doesn’t work for, but it doesn’t always give you the look that you want, it may not be pertinent for the show you are doing, but it is one way to go very fast if you are on that type of show.
Matthew Libatique, ASC
Why are we using bigger units when the film stocks are getting faster?
Because stocks are so sensitive, it works reversely. You cannot go with the smaller units because the stock is so sensitive that it sees all your sins. So you have to go with a bigger source to emulate the naturalism. The lights are bigger because you want to put them farther away; 18K exists, so we put it farther away so that the light will travel and look more natural.
Wally Pfister, ASC
You like to have your arsenal of tools on the truck, ready for anything that you decide. However, I do look at a script as a whole and especially at the story arc: where is it going and where do you want to go with your lights? It’s important to have the visual continuity throughout as well. The film has got to have a common thread, and you can take this thread and you can bend it, you can wrap it around, and eventually that thread cannot be cut; it’s got to run in a linear fashion all the way through that film, so that there is complete continuity and the visuals are not taking you out of the narrative, they are helping the narrative, they are augmenting it, they are helping to tell the story.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
When I started working with Laszlo Kovacs, I would be roughing in when he was working with the director blocking the scene. I would be lighting the set from the background, or maybe outside, working toward the foreground, to the principals in front of the camera. By that time he would know where they would be on their marks and whether he wanted to key the scene from the window or not. So, essentially, we would be working at the same time without too much coordination. I got very familiar with what he liked so it would work out very well without talking back and forth. In those early pictures, there was not a lot of time to release the set to the crew. We were lighting when they were rehearsing. Now in a major production you will have a rehearsal and a scene will be blocked out by a director while we are excused from the set. But on a very pressured schedule, we may have to work simultaneously, with the director rehearsing. It depends a lot upon a director and the people around him if they can work in this situation. Some want absolute quiet and privacy. That is a luxury which you cannot afford in a television schedule.
I start lighting from the background because we do not really know what the actors will do in front. When the director is working on that, I will go and do the windows outside and we will talk and establish, for example, that perhaps the sun comes through the window back there, so we have something to work from. The other school is to light the foreground action and to cut it off from where you don’t want it, and then work your background. The basic question is, Where the hell will you start lighting the scene? Every scene has a key to it, something that will work for you. You see the light through a window or from a chandelier; those are obvious things. But there are other scenes that are less obvious: a stained glass window perhaps, or maybe a plain room with one door open and a shaft of light coming down the hallway, something that would be appropriate for the dramatics. You find this one key, and if you like it, you work from there. Many times it is awfully hard to get that one thing.
Michael Bauman, gaffer
Get as much done in the back, in the background, as possible. A lot of times, depending on action and how you are going to shoot it, the background will really get a lot of your contrast. Sometimes you will end up lighting an actor more evenly—because of his age, or for a certain mood—but at least you will create the depth and contrast with the background.
Harris Savides, ASC
On a movie you have to know ahead of time what you are going to do and have a prelight day or a prerig day. You spend a day doing it, getting it lit. You usually design what you are going to do and that plan works throughout the movie. Hopefully it is not too complicated and it is easy to execute. And then you watch what happens. On a stage it is different than on location. On the stage you design it, you test, everybody gets on board. And the rest of it is executing it, just blocking and getting it “in the can.”
Sometimes actors are blocking each other but it doesn’t matter. And even when it does matter, you have to think about what’s more important. Are you going to interrupt the acting and interrupt their moment? It is a very personal thing. What will you do to the performance by interrupting? You have to weigh that against what you need to fix. You want to do good lighting, but you cannot light for every angle, you cannot make things look good when people unexpectedly look down. Lately I have been lighting very broadly and it is not about the lighting, it is about getting through the day.
You don’t need a lot of light anymore. I use very little light. I just use sometimes what the art department gives me and then beef it up or motivate light always from the windows.
Prerigging is the first stage of lighting decision making. With a very short lighting time allocated on the shooting day, prerigging and prelighting become a necessity.
Haskell Wexler, ASC
When lighting a set, prerigging is a time-saving practice, and it allows you to see the lighting problems in advance. The sooner you get something lit, the sooner you can see whether you have made a mistake or not. This way it w
ill not happen that everyone is waiting and for reasons of time economy you have to live with your wrong decisions.
Robert Elswit, ASC
One of the big changes within the last ten years is that we have prelights now. The real key to this is preproduction planning. You cannot prerig on the day of shooting. It all has to be set ahead of time. If you are able to do that, then it is a matter of hoping that when you get there, you are smart enough to know that you have overdone it, and you can start turning lights off. Which is another big secret. That kind of preproduction planning makes all the difference in night exterior work.
Mauro Fiore, ASC
I do like an extensive prerig. You are lighting spaces, architecture with no actors in the room. And especially in the studio it is important to create that environment. When I am stepping in the room on a stage, the dark box, I don’t get any inspiration. I would rather be there on a prelight and see what I can do to the set. It is lighting the space. Then you have to see how the director wants to block the scene. My prerigging is this: creating an ambience and having the ability to have hard lights ready to go. This is Hollywood and the way you work these days. You have to prepare for almost any situation. So usually you have an extensive number of lights on a truss, ready to be dropped in. You’ll eventually drop these lights in. On location you’ll have a Condor crane instead of a truss. All these things have to be ready in preparation. That’s how the money is spent these days. It may not be spent on having more days, it is not spent on taking more time in preproduction, but it is spent on the day you are there, to be overprepared for anything to happen. That’s really where you spend most of your money. And the extensive setup that is created is basically because of the need for control.
M. David Mullen, ASC
The more rigging you can do in advance, the more time you can save during the shooting day, but that requires either hiring extra crew people to work during your off hours or giving your regular crew a “precall” to show up before call time and do some work in advance. Most productions have room in the budget for the rigging crews and a certain number of precalls for the main crew. And they also budget for what are called extra man days, days when the departments need extra people to handle the work on set. For example, when you are shooting night exteriors, you may need an extra electrician to sit in the Condor all night long. For car-driving days, you may need an extra grip to help rig the camera mounts while the crew is shooting something else. A precall is more useful for things like having electricians show up early to run the power lines from the generator to the set, or the grips build a crane if the first shot of the day needs it, or the camera crew build a Steadicam if the first shot of the day will be using it. Spending the extra money on a few crew people coming in early may save a lot of time on set later once the entire crew, director, and actors show up to work.
So when the gaffer and a key grip submit their budget, they list how many people and hours are needed for rigging and also how many people are needed for extra man days. The line producer will already have his own preliminary budget, and it often does not match what the department heads submit as their budgets. So there is some negotiating that goes on after all the budgets are turned in.
Matthew Libatique, ASC
When you are prerigging, you are making a choice based on architecture, as well as on trying to predict what might happen. This design of the rig becomes an interesting part of the preproduction process. It is deciding what lights are going to work and what will give you the quality of light that you want for the scene.
John Buckley, gaffer
My rigging gaffer is basically my right-hand guy. The instruments are in place. When you go through the script, you discuss with a DP what kind of look the movie is going to have, what kind of colors and everything like that. And then you get the instruments set up. I like to have the instruments set up so that when we are going for the reverse angle, it is much quicker.
Sources of Light
Establishing the sources of light for a given scene provides more clarity in the strategy for lighting.
A daylight scene with strong backlight, indicating sunlight. (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.)
The direction of the light sources will be influenced by the script and the director’s concept of covering the scene. The more camera setups you can get from the director in advance, the less danger of painting yourself into a corner with lighting. Therefore, most cinematographers insist on seeing the run-through of the whole scene before lighting it.
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
The sequence of lighting a scene depends upon how a director works with actors. Unfortunately, many times actors have a late call, so usually you will talk to the director the night before or that morning. You ask him what he will do in that scene. He will rehearse with the stand-ins, walk it through, and he will establish a few things. For example, let’s say somebody walks in through the door and sits down in a certain place. I prerig the lighting for this move. When the actors arrive, even if I am not finished, I will ask the director to have a rehearsal to finalize the action, because many times it will change. The actor will come in with a different idea, and they will change the whole thing. Maybe he won’t come through the door anymore; maybe he will come from the other side of the room, and that means that you would end up doing your job twice. I don’t want to do that, so I like to get a rehearsal as soon as possible. When everything is locked in, the stand-ins will walk it for me; then I light the stand-ins. When this is done, usually you can shoot the scene. Most of the set can be prerigged to a certain degree.
Deciding on light sources involves the aesthetic philosophy of the cinematographer. The two basic orientations are sometimes referred to as naturalism and pictorialism. The naturalistic school of lighting would follow the natural, logically established sources of light in the scene. The pictorialists on the other hand would use light angles that violate this logic if they achieve a more pleasing picture as a result. Of course, there is no cut-and-dried division between these two approaches. It is more a matter of give-and-take between the logic of the source and the compositional requirement of the frame. Generally, most cinematographers believe in justifying the source of light.
Richard Kline, ASC
I establish a source. The position of light can change in various setups but the general character of the source will still look the same on the screen. You just need to enhance the source. Now, whether it needs more light or stronger light, it will still be the same in character.
John Alonzo, ASC
Jimmy Wong Howe once told me, start with the source as the premise, but if the source as the premise does not work and does not look right, then change the source, just make up a source. And that is the best way because in the end, you do not know how they are going to cut the picture. No director will start with the shot of a window and say, “Here is the light coming from this direction,” and then cut to the actor. You may never see the window in the entire scene.
It is the overall character and general direction of the light that matter. The exact angle of light will never be scrutinized by the audience as long as it is not disorienting.
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
It is good to follow practicals but I am not dogmatic. When you see that a person needs another key, you can either start putting light sources on the other side and change everything around, which becomes ridiculous eventually because you will change the look of the room, or you can cheat. Now, how do you cheat? You can always cheat with light sources and the audience will never catch you. Who says that there cannot be a light source outside the frame? If I never shoot in that direction, I never reveal the cheat. You can get away with many things. If I was forced to cheat during the day, I would turn on some lights and use mixed light. But I like to justify the lighting. It is very important that people are lit realis
tically from existing light sources. And if you cheat, you cheat with light sources that you do not see but you feel that they could be there.
Sometimes the light direction is established by what “feels right” even if the logic of the source is violated.
James Plannette, gaffer
If you are photographing a scene and there is a light source in the picture, even fifty feet away, the direction of light should come from this source, even if in the previous shot another source was visible and another direction of light established. If it came from the same direction, but a new source of light was visible, it would be distracting. The audience may not be able to verbalize what bothers them, but something would be bothering them.
Janusz Kaminski, cinematographer
Film Lighting Page 22