When you wish to put a break on a wall, for example, above an actor’s head, you have to use the flag closer to the subject, especially when using a soft light. A flag used closer to the soft light source will cut the general output but not the exact area.
Controlling the walls is also required when lighting from the top. For such overhead soft lighting, softboxes are used. The black velvet skirts can be rolled up and down to control the light falling on the walls or on a particular area.
Another method for overhead illumination consists of covering the entire set with silk or bleached muslin and lighting from above.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
We use silk or bleached muslin to drape over the set as the overhead diffusion. Above this “ceiling” we use 5 and 10Ks so that we can direct the light through it and still have a little bit of control. It softens the light out but leaves enough punch to reach the opposite side of the set. Such light crosses over the people who are standing directly underneath.
To control such lighting, one puts a border of cardboard strips around the overhead diffusion to shade the walls.
Dark paneling, typical for courtroom and boardroom sets or locations, is notorious for “sucking up” light. There are two ways to bring up their appearance: side lighting for texture, or reflecting light into them from large white surfaces such as Griffolyn or UltraBounce.
Using Practical Lamps
Night scene lighting is most often built around the practicals visible in the scene. This is the area where cinematographers and art directors cooperate very closely. Especially when using softer sources to light the scene, one depends on the practicals to add the highlight effects to create a wider range of brightnesses. Sometimes a practical lamp is positioned outside the frame but in such configuration that it will be reflected in some glass surfaces, like a picture frame, to add more visual interest to the scene. Practical lamps will justify our lighting angles.
James Crabe, ASC
Usually, if there is a choice of a couple of lamps in the room, you can pretty much cheat almost anything. But I guess that the more light you add, the less effective the light is. A room usually looks more romantic and cozy if there is one light going; every time you add another one, it tends to diminish that charm. I think that it is really important not to overlight, particularly when working in the sets.
Often the practicals are put on dimmers to control their brightness. This way they can be used more effectively as actual lighting sources. The practicals in the frame can be reduced in intensity and the practicals out of frame can be boosted to provide sufficient light for proper exposure without upsetting the balance in the frame. This is not always possible.
Practical light is used here as the main source, with soft fill light coming from the other side. (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.)
The same set in daylight. The shadow pattern on the bed and wall indicates a window and motivates the direction of the key light. (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.)
Here the practical light is augmented by a soft overhead source and fill light from the right and left sides. Careful examination of the shadows and highlights enables one to interpret the lighting plot. (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.)
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
In a situation, for example, at night when there is one light in the center of the room and that is the only light source that you want to have there, obviously if you kept the light source down in intensity so that the photograph would be normal-looking, you would not have enough light to carry people a few feet away from the one practical. In that case, you would let the practical be bright. If it is a few stops overexposed, it makes very little difference in the overall look of the scene. It also depends on the area in the composition that it occupies. Assuming that you have a long shot initially, the globe will occupy a very small area of the room. You would set it up so that you will have dark things in the foreground, perhaps, depending on the kind of effect that you want to go for. The foreground objects will be silhouetted, the center room objects will be cross-lit from the globe, and the back objects behind the light source will be more or less flat-lit depending on how far away they are. I would not worry about the flare from the globe. Generally speaking, if there is a flare, you can see it. A halo would be acceptable. It would be a visual element to the scene. Now let’s make it even more interesting. Let’s have them get into a fight around this lamp that is maybe sitting on the floor, and they knock it over and the bulb goes out. You have to be able to see something, so even if there is no other light source in the scene, you have to take dramatic license.
Practicals are very difficult to judge. They always photograph at least a hundred percent brighter than they appear. In night interiors, when the practicals are all in proper balance, it looks very dim and muddy to the eye.
When you are using a lamp as a light source as well as compositional element, the part of the lamp that is facing toward the camera can sometimes be darkened with nets in a lamp shade, so that the part that the camera sees is two stops below the back part, which may be lighting someone behind the lamp. Or you can hang little lightbulbs on the back of the lamp shade.
This tiny peanut bulb can also be placed behind a wine decanter or glass teapot to make the liquid sparkle. Bright sources, like bare bulbs, are usually darkened with a brown hairspray. Hairspray is an invaluable accessory for the cinematographer.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
Streaks ’n Tips hairspray washes out very well and dries very quickly. You can use it on hot globes. We use it primarily to darken the camera side of a light; for example, a bare bulb hanging over a poker table. You keep spraying it till it looks good through the camera.
John Buckley, gaffer
In Dreamgirls we did a scene which is supposed to take place in Caesars Palace and we had all these table lamps and it was a big wide shot, so there was almost no way to light them. What we came up with was that we used these little peanut globes that are used in Mini-Moles. We made little bases for them, then we took several V8 juice cans, we cut little squares in them for the bulbs, painted them inside white, and put 1000H diffusion paper in front of them. We put them just behind the practicals, pointing to people seated at the table, and they worked really, really well. The only thing is that you have to talk to the art department to have the bases of the lamps wide enough to hide these cans.
Special Practicals
Some portable practical lights—lanterns, candles, and flashlights—require special attention. As with all practicals, the main problem is to make the visible source not too bright for the latitude of the film emulsion and at the same time to produce enough light to illuminate the subject close to this source. Let’s start with the lantern.
James Plannette, gaffer
Fix a Mini-Mole socket with an inky bulb on the back of the lantern, away from the camera, and hopefully hide the cable—for example, up the sleeve—and always on a Variac. When you put a globe inside the lantern and do all the necessary things, like frosting the glass, and you have it on a Variac or dimmer and fluctuate the light, it still looks like what it really is. So it is better to have the normal wick inside the lantern and the bulb behind the lantern.
When, for staging and lighting reasons, we decide to use a bulb inside the lantern instead of a wick, we will put an 85 gel sleeve around the bulb or paint the bulb orange-yellow.
Gaffers devise very ingenious ways of making lante
rns look real. Hal Trusell, who worked with cinematographer Nestor Almendros (ASC), describes the preparation of such lanterns (“Lighting Goin’ South,” American Cinematographer, March 1979). They scraped vertical lines on the painted bulb. The bulb was inside the transparent chimney sprayed heavily with dulling spray on the camera side. To add realism they would create the effect of a smoking wick by dropping smoldering bits of incense into the lantern’s chimney. These lanterns were operated on AC run through a household dimmer. The portable lanterns, equipped with a tiny Philips #12336 bulb in place of the lantern’s wick, were run on small 12-volt batteries made by Yamaha and hidden in the lantern’s bottom.
Generally, the lanterns themselves will not be adequate to light the scene and some, usually smaller, units will be employed. These lamps will be gelled to match the lanterns and often will be moved during the shot.
Often there is an elaborate setup of lights on dimmers that are modulated depending on the movements of the actor carrying the lantern. Moving shots, of course, require proper staging so that the lantern is carried on one side to hide a gimmick bulb. The camping industry can also provide us with practical lanterns.
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
The Coleman lantern is a nice light source but it will burn out the film tolerance. You can age the front side of the lamp, or a net can be inserted in the shade.
Some scripts require candles on the set. There are a variety of ways to handle this problem.
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
There is also a special candle that is hollow and has space-age insulation and a gimmick globe. There is a slot in the back of this candle. But the best is the real thing, so shoot tests with a real candle. Maybe a thicker wick will give more light. For ambient light in the room, bounce amber light off a card or ceiling above the actor’s head.
There are also practical candles fitted with a tiny globe which stays behind the wick and is hidden by the flame. In this case, the wick is especially thick.
There are several modern solutions to the practical flashlight problem. Sport shops, hardware stores, and Internet sites sell powerful flashlights of brands like SureFire and Maglite. There are also very powerful xenon flashlights available.
An interior location lit by the Chinese lanterns and practical lamps on the tables. This basic lighting scheme may be complemented with some more directional lights for particular camera angles.
Richard Crudo, ASC
Often I’ll use a Maglite—a simple, store-bought flashlight—just to put a little glow in the actors’ eyes when the camera is moving with them. Just put a little diffusion over the lens and off you go. If you’re very smooth, you can move it in and out of position as it’s needed without calling any attention to its use. Once again, a cheap, simple solution to what can be a very knotty problem.
Russell Carpenter, ASC
What we have done in the past is to fashion a snoot to put on a strong xenon flashlight called a Maxa Beam. We made slots in the snoot and put two or three cutout pieces of diffusion in holders in the middle of the light path. Now we had a very soft, very controllable eye light or fill light, and I found that I can take years off people’s faces even if they are moving around, if I keep it at a correct angle. Another very effective use of these small xenon flashlights is as a backlight for night exteriors when it’s difficult to get a conventional light in place. On the small independent film Awake we had a night exterior rooftop scene looking out on the East River and Manhattan from the Brooklyn side. We were about 250 ft. from the Brooklyn Bridge and they wouldn’t let us put any lights out on the bridge, which would have been an excellent place to put my backlight. So our location manager asked the Department of Transportation if we could take a flashlight out there, at which of course they laughed but said yes. So we took this xenon flashlight out to the bridge, switched it on, and it became a powerful backlight source from 250 ft. away. It was a very effective light for me.
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
Using a flashlight is a matter of staging. Color temperature does not matter with flashlights. Actors can do a lot to help the cameraman. You can hide white cards in places where the flashlight will be directed.
A China ball (Japanese lantern) can be used as a practical. It is basically a large, round, white paper lamp shade with a lightbulb inside. It gives a very nice soft light and it can be easily positioned on the end of a pole wherever it is needed. Should it reflect in some glass surface in the frame, it will pass for a practical light on the set.
Caleb Deschanel, ASC
In Being There, I used Japanese lanterns basically as a replacement for lamp shades because they were a lot easier to put in place. You can hang one from the ceiling more easily than you could a lamp. They were never in frame. You could take a cheap Japanese lantern and you could spray-paint a quarter of it black or half or three-quarters of it black, and you could control the shape of the source a bit more than you could if you were using fixed lights. What happens is that lots of times you will get into a situation where you have a baby with diffusion in front of it and then you have all these flags and everything else. And this is something that you can literally put at the end of a C-stand and hang down, and by putting a wire on it, you can control its direction. And, if you’ve got reflections from it, you’re not getting reflections of something that would be bothersome: you get the reflection of some round object that could be a lamp shade. Sometimes you will get into a situation where you have no control over what you’re getting in way of reflections. When you cannot control it, I always prefer something that has a certain logic.
Sometimes practical lamps help in creating false perspective on the set.
Caleb Deschanel, ASC
In Being There, we were supposedly in the Washington Post newsroom. It was a much smaller room and my gaffer, Gary Holt, built some lights that were just triangles which continued after the perspective of the overhead fluorescent. When you looked at it, it looked like the fluorescents went on forever, but in reality they just ended. They were just lights that came down at an angle. We simply adjusted this angle to be the same as the perspective in the ceiling. So you have the light that is vertical but it is a V shape, so that when you see it on film and it is lined up perfectly, it appears as if the lights go off into the distance. I am sure it has been done hundreds of times before but it was new for me.
These two drawings illustrate a sophisticated lighting design for a train compartment scene shot against a backprojected night exterior. The train interior is softly lit by an overhead light diffused through a bleached muslin ceiling and by a fill light mounted over the window and bounced off a white card positioned next to the camera. Outside effects are created by rotating blades that produce moving shadows and by lights that are moved during the shot (similar to Jordan Cronenweth’s solution to this problem in Best Friends).
Mirrors
Glass walls and mirrors are perpetual headaches for lighting people. We all know that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection, so the lamps that are positioned from the camera side will reflect more easily. The camera itself may be a problem as well. The cooperation of the production designer is absolutely essential in overcoming these obstacles.
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
Mirrors are time-consuming and make the production more expensive. Use low camera angles. Work with the set designer. Light from lower positions. Otherwise, there may come a “trap time” when a wide shot will make positioning lights very difficult.
John Alonzo, ASC
On Scarface, the production designer put all the mirrors on gimbals so I could tip them one way or the other and throw the reflections in a different direction.
There are sets where it is almost impossible to prevent the camera and lights from reflecting on glass walls. In such situations a two-way mirror is the practical answer.
Caleb Deschanel, ASC
In Being There we did an interesting scene; we built a set for when Peter Sellers is being made up for the te
levision show. It was all mirrors and it was impossible to be inside the room without actually seeing yourself. So we actually made one end of it from a two-way glass and shot through that. No matter where you looked, you would not see the camera because the camera was actually filming through the mirror.
Mirrors can also help us in reflecting light sources into the set.
Robert Jason, gaffer
Sometimes when you are in a very cramped space, you can use a mirror, because now you double the distance by hitting the light into a mirror and then back to the set. It can also be used if you want a very, very hard light. It definitely seems to make the light harder. And of course outdoors it can be a very quick and efficient way to light over a long distance. Then you can even light a diffusion frame and make it a soft light. You can light a block away with a mirror and you can do it very quickly.
John Buckley, gaffer
I like reflecting light in mirrors, broken mirrors, so that it creates accidental lighting as if it is bouncing off floors or off some pieces of glass that are in the room or something like that. It creates beautiful shapes on walls and everything else in the space. It looks very natural and to soften it out we sometimes use Hampshire or Opal diffusion, just putting it on top of the mirror itself.
Film Lighting Page 24