Process Shots
One of the important facilities offered by the soundstage is the possibility of shooting a process screen. This can be achieved by back projection or by a green or blue screen. It allows for the combination of the live action in front of the screen with some backgrounds produced separately. Lighting for process correctly is a matter of keeping the front action lighting off the screen and balancing the foreground and the background in brightness. For green or blue screen it is also essential to avoid the respective color in the front action lighting, wardrobe, and set design.
Ralph Woolsey, ASC
When using back projection you must keep all front light off the screen, so you would avoid soft lighting. With high-speed films it is possible when desired to keep the screen a little farther from the foreground because of increased depth of field. More space between the subject and the screen makes it easier to shadow the screen.
James Plannette, gaffer
Balance of lighting is most important. On an exterior when people in the foreground are brighter than the background, the scene looks like a bad process. That is what happens in a process scene: they overlight the foreground and people are actually edged from the background and it looks phony. But you can make it look like a bad process shot by just lighting the foreground too much.
In shooting a helicopter scene, they used a back projection screen behind the helicopter and then used another projection screen behind the camera, so it was reflected in the bubble of the helicopter, which really gave a feeling of reality. You can do the same with an automobile, where it will be reflected in the windshield. On a low-budget film, you can do it with a mirror so the rear screen projection is then reflected in the mirror, which bounces back into the windshield. It is not an ideal way, but it works also.
Ian Kincaid, gaffer
In Kill Bill we had Uma Thurman driving a Karmann Ghia in daylight in Mexico (shot on the stage). We just put a big soft light coming through the windshield. We had a rear projection and a big soft light. For me, rear projection rather than a green screen is much better: you actually see what you are doing, you don’t leave it to postproduction. You can evaluate when she makes a turn; it is much better to see it right there with your eyes, and you know that the light should change when she goes around.
Lighting Faces
The human face is the most studied subject that has ever appeared before the lens or on the painter’s canvas. Still photographers and painters before them worked out several ways of minimizing certain features of the human face and augmenting others. The general direction and angle of the key light will establish the mood in which the face is lit. Over the years we have seen countless angelic maidens haloed by light from above as well as Jezebels who are always lit from a low angle. As the saying goes, good people are lit from heaven and the bad people are lit from hell. These clichés are not as obvious in today’s more natural and often softer lighting, yet the angles of light and the composition of light in the frame remain as the most powerful tools for the creation of mood and for the shaping of the actor’s face.
Many techniques employed in the past are still useful to the cinematographer, who has a more difficult problem to solve than the still photographer. His subject moves.
A close-up lit by a soft key light, which is also bounced off the foam core board to provide the fill. Backlight comes from a hard Fresnel source.
Conrad Hall, ASC
We are dealing with moving pictures, and people are in various positions and in many different kinds of light. They cannot be in the same type of light unless you soft light them. Then there is no problem. But if you have a person by a window in bright light and then you take him to a corner in dim light, and you make him turn on the light, then you have those three different equations to deal with. You might have a hard half light on him, and then you might have a no-light look when you see his face in a soft dimness, and then he comes in and turns on the light and he is very brightly lit.
The best way to learn how to light the human face, whether it is stationary or moving, is through experimentation. The still camera and video are both affordable tools for such studies. Even careful observation of people in everyday light can be helpful.
The same lighting design with additional kicker and eye light.
Conrad Hall, ASC
I work with the person. If a person is meant to be unattractive, then you are lighting for unattractiveness. I study the actors’ faces very carefully. I watch them like a hawk all the time when they are drinking coffee, talking to anybody else, moving around. I try to imbue myself with the qualities that I find and the things that happen by accident in nature that appeal to me and apply to the type of lighting used for the story.
Actors are often sensitive about particular features. Any of these “flaws” can be diminished or accentuated to serve the story.
The same lighting design, but the white foam core board is replaced by a black gobo.
John Alonzo, ASC
If a person has a double chin and is conscious about it and doesn’t want to show it, you raise the key up higher and put a dark shadow under the chin. If they have a bump on one side of the nose, you try to keep the key on the other side. If they have a large nose, you try to shoot them straight on. There are a lot of different little tricks, but the actor has to be cooperative. They have to be aware of what you’re doing.
One rule of thumb is to position the light side of the face against the darker background to define the shape of the face and to create separation and depth. Wall color and brightness can cause the face to blend into the wall. Rarely is this a desired effect, but should you wish to deemphasize a bald head or large ears, it may be useful. When lighting an actor with these features, be careful with the backlight, or avoid it altogether. You can also use nets to keep them in shadow.
Sometimes a round face needs extra attention.
This close-up is lit by two soft lights further diffused through Tough Frost plastic material. Backlight remains hard as in the previous setups.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
When you deal with a round face and you do not want to accentuate it, usually you will go high with your light, which brings up the top of the face and the light falls off at the cheekbones, giving you a longer shape of the face. You would not come up from the front with a soft light, because that makes the face even flatter and rounder with the light clear back to the ears.
The key light, eye light, kicker, and backlight are all Fresnel lights in this setup.
One soon learns that deep-set eyes and large noses are usually the main problems to deal with, and these are the features most commented on by the cinematographers interviewed.
Ralph Woolsey, ASC
Sometimes you get problems like deep-set eyes or heavy eyebrows. Some performers cannot stand light very well, particularly outdoors, and they squint and need help in opening their eyes. You may have to set up an overhead butterfly or other scrim, or take the sun off and replace it with another source. Reflectors are impossible for some to face, especially if such persons are not used to them.
The floor-angle key and high-angle kicker are positioned on the same axis.
Once on a western, we had a leading actor who wore one of those hats with a straight brim, pulled down right over his eyes. To fill the eyes in the outdoor scenes I started to use a small handheld reflector, down under the camera lens. And he said, “No, no, you cannot use that. I can’t stand it.” I was a little surprised because he was an experienced actor, but I replied, “OK, but you’ll look like a raccoon if I don’t.” We then agreed not to use it and to look at the dailies for proof. Of course nobody could see his eyes on the screen, and he agreed to the reflector right away. We could not always get the best angle for using that reflector directly from the sun, so once in a while we directed a mirror into it. The reflector was small and soft, and I would ease it on gradually for comfort.
Try to prevent a kicker light from hitting the nose. If the
light is just hitting the tip of a nose that has some irregularity, the result might be annoying in a close-up. By having a person turn slightly, you sometimes get a nice line along the length of the nose, and if straight, it looks OK. But to avoid that one little angle that might look bad during the action, you work to get the light around to a better position. Fortunately, women often have enough hair to keep us out of trouble with nose kicks. But since performers do move in movies, we can’t lock them in one gorgeous angle anyway; however, we do relight for close-ups and try to restrict movement in these. In films of the twenties and thirties, actors were often fixed in beautifully lit positions, and cinematographers even used burned-out gauzes to diffuse the image around a person, which would greatly restrict movement. The wide screen and freedom to move around have required more flexibility in lighting, and some compromise.
A soft light is hung from above as a key. Additional eye light is used on the stand to accentuate the eyes.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
Generally you are concerned about the eyes, how to get the light into the eyes most effectively. For deeply set eyes, you have to light fairly low and to the front. You cannot go around to the side with your light and very high, because the eyes will be shadowed. The bridge of the nose is also a feature to be careful about because you might be able to get the light into the eyes from a certain position, only to see that it gives a bad nose shadow. Then you have to compromise with that. Generally, you try to avoid the kicker hitting the tip of the nose at all costs. It is this hot spot in the middle of the face and we are not used to it. A long diagonal nose shadow is also not too flattering. Soft light softens the prominence of that shadow. We do an awful lot of lighting with a soft light. Even at night we have been doing more soft light work than hard light scenes. You can use soft light on the principal actors and hard light maybe on the walls to control the set. Soft lighting the action eliminates the obtrusive shadows when actors move, so that you do not have shadows busily playing around in the picture.
When dealing with older, more difficult-to-light female faces, it is wise to make tests in advance.
Philip Lathrop, ASC
You generally do it when you make a hair test or a wardrobe test. You do a makeup test at the same time. The makeup test is really for a cameraman.
One way to light a close-up of a woman with many wrinkles is to take a 10K far away, frontal and up, and cover it with diffusion on the light and then a few feet away put another diffusion in front of it. It gives a good modeling and soft shadows. By using a 10K, I get the light which goes right around the face.
There are times when the mood of the scene does not allow for a full frontal lighting. In such circumstances, Lathrop suggests minimizing wrinkles by lighting the face at a half-key level and adding a kicker at full key value. He also uses lots of shadows on faces like that, such as by putting a net across a part of the face.
James Crabe, ASC
To help the problem of aging actresses, you do it the old way: you put the key light over the lens, maybe you soften it a little bit, but not too much because you still want maybe the underside of the chin to go dark. Sometimes using soft light is not the most glamorous way of lighting women. At least on Mae West, in Sextette, we tried to use a rather hard frontal key and some Mitchell-type diffusion on the lens. I shot some test shots with Mae. When she saw them, she said, “I need more light on my eyes and my teeth.” When you think about eyes and teeth, you realize that you can lose them if you have key lights too high. We all know that a real high key light makes dark sockets, but in older people, sometimes their teeth are withdrawn back behind the lip. If you do not get the light low, you do not see the teeth. It is hard to beat that rule: to keep the light low, keep it over the lens, maybe slightly in the direction the person is looking—the old Hollywood kind of lighting, with some nice fill coming from the camera side.
Another kind of Hollywood edict about close-ups of women is that you never shoot them looking down; you never shoot with a low camera—not to say that I haven’t. You have people sitting around a table; you want a dynamic shot, so maybe you have a low camera and you are looking up slightly. Very often these ladies who are camerawise get very nervous when they see a camera down below, and they will say, “Oh, put the camera up.” Now maybe a cameraman will say, “No, this is very good, we are going to relight this,” or the director will say, “Believe me, Betty, it looks great,” but generally speaking they get very nervous when the camera is down, because whenever they look down, their jowls come out and the fold-up double chins and all that stuff. Whereas in the traditional movie two-shot, a man and a woman standing together, the woman is always looking up, the man is always looking down, and he has a little more rugged key light. This is Hollywood lighting. So already the face is pulled to a good position. The key light is very close to the lens and above it usually with some nice fill coming through. That is how they often like to see themselves and often maybe remember themselves. It must be very tough on some of these ladies to see themselves on the reruns on television and then look in the mirror.
Von Sternberg claimed to have invented everything, including Marlene Dietrich and Marlene Dietrich lighting. He used a very exotic effect achieved by putting a very sharp, unfiltered light up high in front to bring out the cheekbones and the nose shadow, sometimes called the butterfly shadow.
In the old close-ups you see the shadow of each individual eyelash. It was really sharp, and of course being sharp, the light could be cut off the hair and off the clothing, and you’d just have that wonderful glowing madonna light coming at you. It is just a matter of putting the light in precisely the right position, but the higher a key goes, the more accurately the head has to be placed to keep that effect on.
Traditionally it seems that the most interesting placement of key lights for defining the planes of the face is rather like architectural lighting on a building. Usually you see a building in three-quarters with one side diminishing sharply. The key light, or the sun, will hit from outside and will leave the shadow side toward the camera. Of course, this is a type of light that painters use a lot in their effects and it delineates the planes of the face. However, with some women you cannot go that far. You suddenly realize that even though it is aesthetically correct and renders the face in the way you like to see it, there is a scar that shows now, or something that was not visible before, so you cheat it around to the front. Of course a lot of old movies would pretty much disregard the lighting continuity and people never even knew it. The key light would be one way for the master shot or the two-shot and then you cut in and the key is now on the other side. I am not quite sure if you can get away with that today. If the key light is a small Fresnel light, it is going to cast a highlight on the face different than a big one. If there is any moisture on the face and you are using a very large reflector, it can cast kind of a phantom reflection over much of the face. Instead of getting a snappy, more concise shadow, such a reflector can produce a skeletal effect.
M. David Mullen, ASC
Lighting from below the eye line will keep the bags under the eyes from producing any shadows, thus making the bags less visible; however, some faces don’t look as good lit from a lower angle. Sometimes they look better, sculpturally, lit from a higher angle. Marlene Dietrich always had very high key light because of the shape of her nose and cheekbones. It just depends on the actor’s face.
For this night interior lighting, a soft 4K light was used to create a soft, yet quite directional lighting. (Frances, Laszlo Kovacs, ACS, cinematographer)
(© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)
Russell Carpenter, ASC
Usually if I am using my bounce low, I have it just off the camera frame. If somebody has a very angular face, and her cheeks are not full, I find that by bringing a bounce card—it could be 2 × 2 ft. or 4 × 4 ft.—and catching an ambient light, or bouncing a key from below, if it is just r
ight, it will look like it is all part of natural light. Sometimes when people have real problems around the eye sockets, I may be coming with another light, a xenon flashlight or a Kino Flo with some diffusion to fill in that area slightly. Sometimes I’ll create a passive fill by bringing in a bounce card, 2 × 2 ft., and catching just enough of the ambient light. Sometimes to bring a little blue light from the side, you can use a bounce card painted in some shade of blue.
Beauty Lighting
One of the major skills that any employable cinematographer has to have is to make actors look their best. Finding what lighting works best for a given face starts when shooting tests.
Russell Carpenter, ASC
I think that especially on a low-budget film you don’t have a lot of time to test. I run a very simple test that tells me a lot. I call it the “phases of the moon,” I take a fairly small but soft light source like a China ball or a 2 × 2 ft. Rifa-Lite and I run it in a 360-degree pattern around an actor. I just see from which way an actor keys better. What I can get away with, what I cannot get away with. I do a lot of light angles that I’ll never use in the movie, but there are always surprises. I may think that this actor will not look very good with a light bearing in here, and I try it and I find that this actor actually looks great. So basically it is a very quick note-taking thing. I start with the light over frame right and I move it to over frame left and I take notes, and I remember that this lighting situation is one I may use in the movie. I shoot usually on film and on a digital still camera.
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