On Babel there is a scene when they cross the border at night and we couldn’t actually do it on a border crossing. So we adapted one of these customs checkpoints inside Mexico. We dressed and enhanced it to look like a border crossing, and our art department built a roofed road. I also played with adding streetlight lamps on both sides of the border. On the Mexican side I used mercury vapor, so when the car is approaching, it has this blue-green light, and then when they are going to the U.S. it becomes sodium. In that way I divided the two countries, and I had a chance to design the whole light of the place itself. For the interiors I used a big Chinese lantern with a metal halide bulb inside it. This we put in as a key light for the characters and then some small tungsten units as well.
I enjoy designing street lighting or industrial light. What I love about this job is that it is always different, there are always different opportunities, different challenges. On State of Play there is a scene when Rachel McAdams leaves the hospital and meets Russell Crowe as it is raining outside. It is a pretty big shot with a huge building and the rain, so I needed one big source. I used a Bebee light for that. What’s great about it is that I could aim some of the lights toward the rain, some of the lights toward the building, and it was still only one unit. I basically just used that light backlighting the rain, just letting the characters go silhouette. Then when I did the close-ups, I blocked that light and used the Kino Flo Blanket-Lite, which I use a lot. I think I used an extra full grid diffusion on it, with no fill. On the Bebee light I used the full plus green, so it would be a little more like metal halide as opposed to just HMI, so I matched that on the Blanket-Lite.
James Plannette, gaffer
I use a GAM gel in the color called brass to simulate sodium vapor streetlights. It seems to me to be just the right color for that, and then, depending on the movie, I either add green or not.
M. David Mullen, ASC
Rosco has a couple of new gels. Urban Vapor looks the way you think sodium vapor streetlamps should look, sort of an apricot color. The Industrial Vapor actually matches the color of sodium vapor, which is sort of a brown plus green, a bit sickly. And then there is theatrical sodium vapor, which is much more pleasant, more like an apricot, orangey color. So they are making two types of sodium vapor gels, plus, they also have dyed the grid cloth. So you can get a grid cloth that is dyed orange or blue. If you want to create a “moon box,” they’ve got a pale blue dyed one and they’ve got a medium blue. So you can build a big box with a grid cloth that is already gelled.
Robert Elswit, ASC
I just had night street scenes in New York, which were very difficult to do. We were shooting Duplicity downtown in Manhattan, in the West Village. Julia Roberts had a long walk that started outside a brownstone building. She is walking almost two city blocks and then is turning onto Seventh Avenue. The problem in New York in certain locations is that there is no ambient light. If you are in the street in the West Village, there are a couple of streetlights, but there are no other lights. There is nothing there, you may as well be in a back lot. You have to re-create the whole thing. Question is, do you put a big Bebee light up and backlight the street? What I ended up doing was putting smaller units all along the walk and trying to imitate a feel of ambient light from the windows, streetlights, porch lights, and not backlighting the whole street. And keeping lights no higher than the New York streetlights, which is about twelve feet in the air. So instead of having something sixty feet up, if I have the time I would rather take lots of smaller units. I had them on fire escapes, hidden behind trees, on the lampposts next to the real streetlight, pointing down.
This kind of lighting doesn’t call attention to itself. You don’t feel like you’re looking at a backlit street. I realize that most people seeing a movie probably aren’t even aware of this. But it ends up feeling a little artificial, that big blue backlight. Sometimes there is nothing else you can do because you don’t have any time. For long moving shots, like a Steadicam shot, I light the beginning and I light the end, and I get a sense where I am in between. Then I find the moments in between where I do or don’t want to see what is going on. It seems like the simplest approach to me, because I know that at some point it is going to be a time issue where I have to stop.
In moving shots a light is often carried along with the moving actors.
Colin J. Campbell, gaffer
Sometimes you can’t put the light where you want it, because it will end up in the frame when the camera moves. One solution is to move the light during the shot. If the actors are moving and the camera is moving, it is very easy to move the light at the same time. It can be handheld or on a stand; it can be soft or hard. It is really a nice way to put a dishonest light in an honest environment and not know that it is there. Because the camera is tracking, the actors are moving, and you keep the light moving so it changes, it is not always there, but it still solves the problem.
Robert Jason, gaffer
At night you have a dilemma that once you turn one light on in the foreground, now how far do you want to keep going? If you can carefully pick your locations for night shots, maybe all you need is just a little bit of accent lights here and there on buildings, because streets can be so brightly lit nowadays, at least for what film is able to pick up, that all you have to do is gently light the foreground and the shot won’t be greatly out of balance. Maybe just shape light in the foreground instead of making it brighter.
You certainly cannot be afraid of letting the actors go in and out of key lights. There can be pools of light, there can be light from the top, maybe you have access to the shops they are walking by and you can light in there. They are walking by streetlights and you can enhance those streetlights, and then of course it’s very effective to also walk with light along the camera, and that can be anything from the Kino Flo to a Chimera with a light behind it to a China ball on a pole. There are a million ways to do it.
John Buckley, gaffer
I like to do accent lighting on homes or businesses, just to make it feel within a context, and then I like a big source that pulls out certain parts. It is usually a Bebee light. I built a double diffusion frame that we could put on the light. I could move it all around and it worked terrific.
On night exteriors, especially with fires, I use fay lights through diffusion.
When the night exterior is not in town and the only logical source of light is the moon, lighting takes on quite a different character.
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC
In Brokeback Mountain I had several moonlit night exteriors. That’s really tricky. I find it very challenging to make moonlight believable, much more so than an urban night exterior. My gaffer Christopher Porter suggested using weather balloons, which are reflective, and we had HMI units gelled with half CTO and half plus green bouncing off these balloons. Sometimes I used tungsten and HMI in the same shot, simply because of the throw and intensity of different units. On the tungsten lights I used half CTB and half plus green to match the color of the HMI units. In one scene, for example, we placed a Dino very far away on a 100 ft. Condor to light the background, and the foreground was lit by the bounced HMIs on the weather balloons. The challenge was making all these units feel like one source, so we had to be very careful blending them in from the same general direction and avoiding several shadows. I feel that moonlight seems colorless to the eye, especially if you have warm sources. It is cold compared to fire; it seems cool but not blue. I find that green softens the electrical blue of HMI and also reduces the magenta in the skin, so it seems to desaturate color to my eye. I feel that this combination of gels is the closest to the sensation of “colorless” moonlight.
Ian Kincaid, gaffer
I never use HMIs for night exteriors. I use tungsten units. We use the bam-bams (huge softboxes) as big backlights, we use maxis (maxi brutes), we use the bigger instruments going directly through diffusion. For a big night exterior we will put the Condor up with a Dino and a couple of maxis, or a Dino and a maxi and
a couple of PAR cans.
Flying moon for an overall soft illumination of a large area
We build a lot of flying moons. In Kill Bill we built a 40 × 60 ft. diffusion frame with one of our bam-bams above it so it was super soft. We could raise the bam-bam up and down and it had a bit of a skirt on it to keep it lighting within this 40 × 60 ft. frame. We floated it up in the middle of a desert on a construction crane; it was beautiful.
Not only the quality of light but also the angle of the light creates the night character. Usually a three-fourths back angle works well for such effect.
Flying moon on an industrial crane, 80–120 ft. high
James Plannette, gaffer
On E.T. we created moonlight with four 10Ks rigged on two cranes with arms extended eighty feet. We put those cranes on each side of the “landing site” as three-fourths backlights. With other 10Ks we lit the dark trees behind the landing site and we took the direct light off the grass with solids. The ambient light which this very light grass picked up was enough to get a reading and yet it did not look lit. The site was about the size of a football field. The foreground action was filled with light reflected off a 12 × 12 Griffolyn. With Griffolyn you have a total control of the angle.
A very even moonlight can be created over a large area using the flying moon, originally employed by Haskell Wexler. It usually consists of a 10 ft. cube made of aluminum pipes and covered with bleached muslin. (The original Wexler moon was shaped like a pyramid.) This cube, which houses four 2500-watt HMIs, is hoisted by an industrial crane to 80 to 120 feet. In this position it gives a usable ambient light level in a radius of a quarter mile. Apart from the high cost of the crane rental, another limitation is that when there is a wind, it swings. The flying moon can also be used on a high stage to simulate a night exterior.
Nowadays the flying moon is often replaced with the balloon lights discussed in chapter 2.
The color of moonlight remains subject to interpretation.
James Crabe, ASC
Everyone has their own idea what moonlight is. I still believe moonlight to be kind of blue or bluish. Even though I know that time exposure by the moon will produce a photograph identical to sunlight, it won’t be blue, it will be perfect. It is sunlight bounced off a white moon. When I go out to the desert to work on some commercial and I walk out from my room at night, from a room that has tungsten source, by comparison the moonlight seems blue. I generally would use a quarter to maybe a half blue gel. And of course moonlight, if it is in cross light or backlight, is probably a little bit more believable than if it is very frontal. But that has been a sore point of cameramen and gaffers and other people for a long while, what color a moonlight should be.
On occasion a night location happens to be on the seashore. As we cannot illuminate the ocean, we have to create enough depth to indicate it.
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
My preference is to try to find a location where there is a curved bay or a pier or a boat dock or something that gives you motivation for a light source, to give you halation in the water. And this applies to the ocean or to a lake or to a river. And you may be able to get by with just the available light, whatever is out there, and if there is none, you can create it. You don’t have to take the generator out there, you can have a battery pack and a string of lights, because you are not lighting as such, you are reflecting. You are creating practicals out there, to reflect in the water.
At times we need water reflections on actors’ faces, perhaps in a swimming pool area. Conventional method uses an aluminum cooking tray with pieces of a broken mirror covered with water. By bouncing a hard light off the water and at the same time shaking the tray, we produce very strong reflections. More gentle reflections can be achieved by eliminating the shards of mirror and bouncing a hard light just off the rippling water.
Another common night exterior is a campfire scene. Lighting people sitting around the fire can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Possibly the oldest device consists of pieces of white cloth hanging from a stick, which is moved in front of a light. Then came dimmers and finally automated flicker boxes. The lights flickered by these devices can be positioned between the fire and the actors.
Robert Jason, gaffer
For a general fire effect, everyone has their own feeling on that, on what looks real to them. I think that for my own taste I would rather see no flicker or a very subtle flicker, and I’ve never seen these mechanical flicker boxes make an effect that looked very real. I found that a good dimmer board operator can create a fire effect very, very well. I think that there has to be at least three or four levels. You cannot do it with just one light. You need multiple lights to make it look real. There should be one light that is maybe a little bit underexposed, like a fill light that just never goes off.
For a campfire, a very realistic look is if you can put a real fire close to somebody or you can beam a light through fire, but now you are cooking your actors. I find an effective way if you need to enhance the firelight is to bury lights, just bury them around the fire, small units, and point them up at the actors. This gives you a constant low exposure and lets the fire do the variance in lighting.
Robert Baumgartner, cinematographer and gaffer
For There Will Be Blood I designed and built some lights for the fire scenes. The concepts and qualities of the lights came from Chris Menges (ASC, BSC). Chris always talked to me about light qualities, not specifics. For him lights needed to have energy, spark, and life. Nothing was worse for him than a dull light. Understanding what he wanted took some time. So when designing the lights for There Will Be Blood, I used a Chris trick. Lots and lots of small clear “bubbles” as close together and as big as possible. He loved to call practical bulbs “bubbles.” I thought this concept would be great for a fire effect, so I built a series of 2 by 4 ft. panels. Each had 160 clear 25-watt bulbs (bubbles) all smack right next to each other. I wired them in six different circuits, so that they could be dimmed at different rates through a dimmer board. This way I could find the proper fluctuation and flash rate in order to create an organic effect. In front of the panel I put a series of gels that were cut in all different shapes; reds, oranges, yellows, some greens, some blues. So when the light projected through it, it wasn’t just one color. I also built a series of small panels 8 × 16 in. in the same manner each with 60 clear, 15-watt peanut bulbs, so I could put them between the fire and the actors. We dug shallow holes and positioned these panels so they were literally coming from the fire. Lots of small clear bubbles created that energy and spark.
Another way to approach a campfire scene is to make the fire be the actual source of light. Auxiliary gas jets or gas pipes with many openings can be installed next to the fire or next to the camera, and the flow of propane gas is then regulated to create the flicker effect.
To create the fire effect on people or sets, you can use an orange Mylar loosely stretched on a frame. You bounce the light off the Mylar, shaking the frame at the same time. The greatest danger is in overdoing this effect.
Location Interior
Location interiors vary from very confining spaces like bathrooms and elevators to vast city halls and cathedrals. They also vary in the prevailing type of lighting—daylight, tungsten, fluorescent, or a mixture of all these. The amount of available working space will dictate the size and placement of the lighting instruments. Low ceilings and the lack of a grid force the cameraman to place lights closer to the subjects. This creates two problems: hiding the lights and achieving an even illumination. Whenever space permits, it is preferable to use a more powerful light from a greater distance in order to even out the light.
Nowadays fast film emulsions and digital cameras allow for much more use of bounced lighting and for the use of practicals properly arranged so that they are not too bright from the camera side. Often the practicals are augmented by hiding bulbs behind the existing light fixtures.
LOCATION INTERIOR/EXTERIOR
Daytime interiors
often have a combination of daylight and artificial sources. The way in which each of these types of illumination is used will influence the atmosphere of the scene. Sunlight is often redirected into the interior. For example, standard silver reflectors positioned outside the building can reflect sunlight through the windows directly onto the ceiling, off which the light again bounces to create a soft overall illumination in the room. Reflectors can also be used to provide a strong backlight coming from the outside.
Allen Daviau, ASC
Oftentimes you find that you can hide reflectors outside to give extra edges through the windows. It is amazing how the eye will forgive an edge light, backlight coming in at an unusual angle. If you have a scene where there is one window way back across the room and you have somebody sitting in the front, and it is obvious that in no way could that window be putting any light on this person, if you direct edge light on the person from the window side, the eye will accept it.
Robert Baumgartner, cinematographer and gaffer
Film Lighting Page 30