I don’t justify sources. There has to be a certain logic and it depends on the movie. If the movie is realistic, then you have to follow a certain logic so the audience understands what is going on. Other times you are making movies that just look interesting. In a genre movie like film noir, you are permitted to do certain things that stylistically make no sense but will look good for the story. For example, in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, there is a sequence where I bounce light from a silver bounce card, which gives a little ripple effect like from the water, and I lit the entire scene with that. There was no reason to do it, it just felt like the right thing, as the guy is waking up from a coma and everything is very weird. Perhaps there is some light coming through the windows, bouncing from the ocean and creating that kind of a ripple effect.
Lights are always prerigged in advance. And immediately when the rehearsal is over, you start setting the interior lights, the key lights. And the lights are really affecting the actors’ performance.
Long Shot and Close-up
Once the light directions are established, the time comes to execute the lighting strategy for the master shot and the coverage of the scene in closer shots. The extent to which the lighting will have to change from a long shot to a close-up really depends on many aspects of a scene. With predominantly overhead soft lighting for a master shot, the eye sockets can look cavernous. Close-ups will most likely require some “cleaning of the eyes,” which means filling them in with lower angle light to get rid of the shadows. In hard directional lighting, the changes will often depend upon the individual features of the person in close-up and on the composition of the frame, which tends to be affected more by hard directional light. Many cinematographers feel that if they spend more time and care on lighting the long shot, then there will be fewer delays and problems when they move into close-up coverage.
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
I usually spend a lot of time lighting a master and I usually do the rest of the shooting with very few changes. I prefer to spend 25 percent more time to light a master than an average cameraman would, but then I use much less time on the close-ups. Directors do not like to wait too long after the master for the close-ups because they lose the level of the performance. Many times a director will set up two cameras and get a master and a close-up at the same time. Of course, I don’t like to use this technique too much because you end up doing the close-up with a long lens, in a lighting set for a master shot. This is sometimes limiting, especially when working on location. In cases where I cannot light the master right, I will correct it in the close-up. I always try to bring the light through windows or from light sources, so it looks right and it can be used for the master and the close-up as well.
Caleb Deschanel, ASC
In a wide shot you can overexpose much more in the highlights than you can in a close-up. In a close-up you want to make the light more flattering to an actress than you would in a wide shot. In a wide shot you can get away with the face not being as beautifully lit. Oftentimes you are not able to get light where you want it in a wide shot because the camera is seeing where you would really like to put the light, so there are always these factors. You want the illusion of the close-up being the same as the wide shot. And if you can improve it because you are moving closer, then why not?
Robert Baumgartner, cinematographer and gaffer
For most of my career as a gaffer, working with various DPs, we generally lit for the wide shot first. If the powers that be choose to do close-ups or long-lens shots first, you still need to figure out how to light the whole space first, and then you make adjustments for the close-ups, but it seems kind of ass-backwards to do close-ups before the wide shot, not to mention more time-consuming in the long run.
Coming closer to a close-up may require a change in the lighting ratio to better match these two shots.
Colin J. Campbell, gaffer
When you move from a master to tighter shots, you want to stay true to the look, but you also might need to bend, soften, or adjust the light to make it more flattering than was possible in the wider shot.
The background may need adjusting as well when coming to a close-up. For example, in a long shot the shadow on a wall is halfway up the wall. In a close-up, actors may be only against white, so you have to adjust the shadow line. Specific lighting procedures always depend on the subject.
Haskell Wexler, ASC
You have to know what the scene is. Let’s suppose that it is a motel room. Two people are seated at the end of their beds watching the TV set. You rig a light that would simulate the light from the TV set. Now the director probably wants to turn the light between the two beds on or off, so you rig that light into a switcher. Generally speaking, we do not let the actors turn the lights on or off in a scene. They put their hands on the switch and we switch them off. You might have a small softbox or a small square soft light on top of a set, so that there is an ambient exposure light, so to speak.
Sometimes you just light the room. You take the existing sources in the room and you enhance them visibly. You light the room for a naturalistic film and then, when they come to a close-up, you hit the eyes a little bit but not so much that it destroys the lighting character of the room. You do change the lighting when coming to a close-up, but nobody should know it. Unless, again, you are trying to make a dramatic point. Sometimes you can make a dramatic point that is not necessarily realistic. I can imagine a film where someone is starting to cry and it is a very high dramatic moment in a film that is not realistic in its concept. You can rig a light to a dimmer to slowly brighten the person’s eyes. It is perfectly legitimate in this film. In a realistic film, when you go to a close-up, you have to keep the change in the same character as the other shots. The light that was hitting on the right side of the face in the master should not hit on the left side in a close-up.
Compared with location, the studio provides a cinematographer with much more freedom. He or she can put the lights where they’re wanted and can leave them there for the required period. On location, a small change of a camera angle may necessitate dismantling many lights that would become visible in the shot and starting from scratch. This relighting wastes valuable time. On a soundstage, larger lighting units can be used from greater distances. Farther away from the source, the intensity of light changes less with distance and therefore will be more even. There is also more room on the stage for setting up Century stands with flags, nets, scrims, and other devices to modulate the lights.
In this example the window was established as the source of light. Only the man sitting behind the desk is in the direct light beam from the window. The remaining areas are keyed only approximately from the window side, to preserve the general logic of the light source. The soft light on the right provides the general fill.
To create the shadow pattern, a venetian blind was hung in the middle of the room, and a 2K light with the lens removed (an open-eye junior) was used to light it. A soft light was added to partially fill the shadows. (Frances, Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, cinematographer)
(© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)
The practical drawbacks of locations can be quite serious. The camera “liberated” from the stage becomes imprisoned by the confines of small interiors. The sound recorded on location is often unusable. The legal trouble of negotiating with private property owners with high financial expectations makes it very expensive from the production point of view. After a period of great popularity of location shooting, the realization came that in many ways the soundstage offered freedom that locations were lacking. Perhaps today a happy medium is achieved. Choosing to shoot on a soundstage or on location is based on both creative and logistical considerations.
Studio Day Interior
For day interiors, windows are the most logical light sources. Cinematographers feel more and more uneasy about the key light coming from high above and creating what is considered a “film
look” as opposed to the reality of light coming from the window or the practical light sources inside. Here the time of day will obviously influence the character of the lighting. If the major light source is the window (perhaps with tracing paper or other diffusion) then 12/18 HMI or a tener (10K) “punching” through it can be hoisted up or down to simulate the position of the sun.
When it is very early in the morning or very late in the afternoon, light coming into the room will be at a very low angle, almost parallel. Any additional lights will follow this pattern. For a sunset or a sunrise effect, an orange gel on a source will warm up the light.
The venetian blind effect was enhanced by using a 10K light with the lens removed to obtain a sharper shadow pattern. (Frances, Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, cinematographer)
(© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)
Generally, when a scene in the script is designated as day interior, a specific hour of the day is not frequently established. The cinematographer creates a general daylight.
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
I cheat a lot in daylight interiors because I never think of the sun being as high overhead as it is in California in the summer. I assume the location is in Sweden or in Ireland, where the sun travels low around the sky even in the summer months. I cheat on the time of day because it is rarely important that you play a scene at a specific time. If a scene calls for day, it could be 10 a.m.; why does it have to be noon? I determine time of day when I read the script. When you are making a detective story, though, and the time may be very important, then I would follow a scheme of exact hours and play with the shadows. But very seldom would you have a story like that. So for me, day is 10 a.m. or 3 p.m., but it is never 12 noon.
The effect of shafts of light coming through venetian blinds, so often used in the detective films of the forties, is as popular among today’s cinematographers as it was sixty years ago. Either an HMI, a xenon, or a 10K lamp without a lens is used to create a sharper shadow. The shadow cast by rain-spattered windows can also be heightened by removing the lens from the lamp. When a Fresnel lens is removed from an HMI, it should be replaced with an ultraviolet-proof glass to protect the actors and the crew from the burning rays of ultraviolet radiation.
Day interior logically requires a rather soft light, except for harsh sunlight coming through the window. The upper parts of the walls tend to be darker, depending on the angle of the sun.
When the windows are visible in the shot, what is seen through them becomes an important concern of the cinematographer. Here, the set designer’s cooperation should make our lives a little bit easier. The exterior on the studio set will usually consist of a backdrop and some scenery elements such as greenery and architectural details. A Translite backing is often employed nowadays. It is a backdrop made of huge photographic enlargements glued on a thin material and lit from behind, or from the front by several large light sources. The black-and-white enlargements are painted over to the required hue and saturation. A net in front will soften it and add more depth. There are also nets used on windows to modulate the background.
Allen Daviau, ASC
The intensity of the window has to be realistic enough that you miss that there is nothing out there. At the same time it cannot be so hot and such a big part of the frame that it pulls the eye away from the compositional point that you try to draw it to.
I don’t think that there will ever be an absolute solution to working on stage with windows during the day interiors. I hate backings with a passion. If somebody gives me a backing, I usually try to burn it out so that it is almost not there. Background paintings seem to have been developed for black-and-white films. And for some reasons the black and white can accept its being graphically present.
To create a hot window but with a little detail behind it, you can put a bobbinet [white gauze] stretched on the frame in the window, and you backlight this net. Then you put greenery out there and frontlight the greenery. If you angle the bobbinet across the window, the amount of light that you put on that net determines how transparent it is. If I have a ficus or other bush standing out there and I put a lot of light on it to make the greenery come through, but still it looks too artificial, I can backlight the bobbinet and have the greenery virtually disappear. Or have just some movement of the bush there, just the shadow.
I don’t feel that you can do any kind of a large-scale day exterior on a stage and have people believe it. An eye just knows that it isn’t really out there. Tracing paper in the window and a light behind it is a wonderful way of sourcing; it is as true a window source as you can have if you can get away with it. And you can even see a piece of the window as long as it is not too big a part of the frame. It is a lovely source.
Night Interior
For night scenes, hard directional lighting is more justified. This does not mean that night character cannot be created with soft lighting. It is done all the time. It really depends on the type of practical sources visible in the frame and, above all, on the visual concept of the film. For example, black-and-white photography requires directional light in order to separate the objects in the frame. Therefore, more units are used to light the scene. The sets are basically lit separately from the action. The illusion of night is created by the angle and the distribution of light. The angle of the light tends to be less frontal for a night effect. The percentage of well-lit areas in the frame is smaller. One strategy is to underlight foreground objects or even characters in relation to what is behind them.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
Every item in the room has an optimum angle to be lit from. Say you have a lamp in the corner of a living room; you may light the chair with the light coming from one side of the lamp, and you will light the couch from another side, and you will light the flowers on the coffee table maybe from above. So you will end up using several units to imitate that one source. Then when people are moving around, the situation is complicated even further. Of course, you have to take many liberties with justifying your sources.
The lighting at the dinner table simulates an overhead chandelier. Lights are used with diffusion. A practical lamp in the background helps to create the feeling of depth on the set and adds to the night mood of the scene. (Frances, Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, cinematographer)
(© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)
Anytime you have a source of light in the frame, it adds definition to the picture; it gives you a reason for your source. Say that we have a few people around the table. If there is one lamp in the middle of the table, then you have to light each person from the center. So essentially, if you have five people sitting, you need five lights, unless you double up on one. But if you put it to the side, you can light them all with one light as a source and then just fill in from the front. And if one person gets up and walks away, he does not have to walk through the light; he is still lit from one side. It looks real. This way then, on a lower budget film, you can make it easier for yourself by keeping your source to one side of the frame.
The situation of lighting a dinner table is a good example of making our life easier by using a soft source.
M. David Mullen, ASC
Sometimes I’ll have the electricians and grips build a lightweight softbox roughly the dimensions of the tabletop. The softbox would usually have a thin wooden frame to hold a grid of lightbulbs, have foam core sides, and a bottom of diffusion gel to soften the light. It usually has some black skirting as well to keep the spill off the background walls. Because it matches the shape of the table, all the actors sitting around under it have more or less the same intensity and softness of light on their faces. However, this approach does take up a certain amount of space and you’d need a high ceiling and a way to rig this box.
On a smaller scale, you could hang two 4 ft. 4-bank Kino Flos or something in that size range to create a roughly square soft ligh
t (or use a Flathead 80, though the two 4-bank Kinos may be lighter in weight than a single Flathead 80). Or use a large paper lantern for a small round table or two paper lanterns in a row for a rectangular table. Or bounce a light off the ceiling and try to skirt or flag the bounce off the background walls; again, Source Fours are good for doing this because you don’t have to flag the light itself, just the bounce back down. The trouble with using a bounce is that you can skirt only three sides of the bounce; one side has to be left open for the lamp to be able to hit the ceiling. Then as you move around the table to shoot coverage, you’ll have to keep moving the lamp, providing the bounce and the gap in the skirt for that light, while closing the previous gap.
If you don’t want an overhead lighting effect, another way is to have table lamps and perhaps even hide additional lights behind them. I have used table lamps with small shades and then pointed a Source Four or Dedolight into the white tablecloth so I got a little bounce light up into the actors’ faces, adding to what the practicals created.
Treatment of Walls
One of the practical differences between hard and soft lighting is the treatment of walls. With directional light covering the exactly defined areas, the walls have to be treated separately with lights specifically positioned for this purpose. In a soft lighting technique our efforts go in the direction of limiting the amount of soft light reaching the walls. We do it with very large flags and with teasers hanging over the set or positioned on stands on the floor. That does not mean that the walls will be entirely lit by the light designed for the action. In some situations they may have to be lit separately.
Film Lighting Page 23