Chris Menges (ASC, BSC) on The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada guided me in lighting a day scene of a cabin on the ranch. After rehearsing the scene, he asked me to “push” maxi brutes with full blue gel and light diffusion straight through each window and then set three or four powerful 6K HMI PARs at full spot, focused steeply down toward the floor with some half orange gel. At first I was somewhat confused and wondered how this was going to work. To me things were a bit inverted, and on the small budget and time, it seemed like we were going to fight the natural light that we had available. We were adding blue to cool the warm tungsten and orange to warm the blue HMI. I’ve done this before on music videos but not for a dramatic, naturalistic narrative, but his idea worked out quite well. The maxi brutes with multiple bulbs, “pushed” through the diffuse full blue, created this soft yet energetic ambient blue sky light. The HMI PARs were used as both a source of warm sunlight and a very practical bounce off the floor. Inside, the cabin was completely empty of film gear, except his favorite tool, bleached and unbleached muslin scraps, lying strategically in pools of warm HMI sunlight pouring in the windows. He shot 360° and never saw a light, the actors and director had full freedom, and you would never had know it was anything but the real thing. Absolutely stunning. He made me fall in love with tungsten all over again.
Robert Elswit, ASC
On There Will Be Blood, instead of aiming lights through windows, I ended up taking bleached muslin and angling it and then bouncing an enormous amount of light off the bleached muslin into the window as a key. I had sometimes six 18Ks bouncing off white muslin outside those windows. It had a very dramatic quality to it, because often there would be almost no fill and the ratio of contrast would be extreme.
For a more specular redirection of light, mirrors can be used. Reflectors or mirrors positioned outdoors will require frequent manual adjustment because of the movement of the sun.
Ralph Woolsey, ASC
Years ago, particularly on westerns, some of the studios had heavy, reflector-size mirrors for bouncing sunlight. For a scene in a barn or a cave, you could direct a four-foot beam of light way in and have reflectors inside to pick it up. Using two reflectors, you would lose some light even with the hard sides. But with a mirror to start, there is very little loss. Now it is possible to get lightweight mirrorlike plastic, but it must be stretched really tight and flat.
When the exterior is seen in the frame and remains too bright, neutral density gels will be placed on the windows. As an alternative to neutral density, some cinematographers like to use Roscoscrim, which resembles a black net. It cuts down the light by two stops. The general advantage of Roscoscrim over the ND gels is that it does not reflect the light sources. Care has to be taken so that it is not in focus, which would reveal its texture. To create an unobstructed path for the light generated by the lamps outside the windows, the gels or scrims are put at an angle, so that the light beam comes between them and the window. Neutral density gels and Roscoscrims are sufficient for sets illuminated with daylight-type lights, such as HMIs. For sets lit with tungsten light, an 85 gel has to be added to the windows.
When the background brightness changes between shots, we have to keep changing the densities of the NDs on the windows so that the look of the whole scene will remain consistent. When long scenes are scheduled to be filmed on such locations, frames should be prepared with gels of various densities for all the windows, so that the gel changes between shots will not cause extensive delays. Particularly in the winter when the days are shorter, good planning is essential to maximize the use of the daylight.
It is often desirable to have the exteriors slightly overexposed for the sunny, hot feeling, or actually bluish for a rather cold effect. A three-stop difference between the interior and exterior allows visibility of people on the outside. Here again the tests evaluating the latitude of a given film emulsion are extremely helpful.
Allen Daviau, ASC
Another thing that the cinematographer gets involved with is dressing the outside. Make sure that on location you have enough plant greens. Sometimes you can save what would be a disastrous shot by simply filling a piece of hot sky with one piece of green out there. And again, if it is out of focus, it does not matter. There are some wonderful artificial greens available now, made of fabric. They are very expensive but they have this wonderful translucent, yellow-green quality. You can just roast them with light and you are not killing a real plant.
Window intensity can often be controlled by curtains or blinds. Jordan Cronenweth recalls using practical window shades made of neutral density gels.
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
You can filter the windows if you don’t have somebody coming in and out through the doorway. If you have somebody coming in and out of the door, then you have to build a neutral density screen far enough back of the doorway so that they can get between the neutral and the door to make an entrance. Then you have problems with their shadows and you have problems with reflections in the neutrals, so you have to build a black enclosure. It is one of those things that starts getting out of hand. The best thing to do is to go with nature as much as you can. Shoot the sequence late in the day if possible; light levels are then lower and you don’t have to deal with such incredible differences.
There are all kinds of things that you can do to have the interior and exterior balanced. I had a scene in the last picture I did in a sales office overlooking the harbor. I had the set dresser and the art director make up neutral density shades that you could pull down that looked like they were a part of the dressing, the kind of thing that people would pull over the windows during the heat of the day. So the camera was always looking on the exterior through the shades. And I left the 85 on the camera so the exterior looked neutral in color. In a situation like that, you have a conversation with the director and he is aware that you can shoot the entrances and exits later in the day. You shoot the other angles—when you don’t look out through the door—during the course of the day while you are waiting for the light to get ready to do the interior/exterior shots.
For continuity it is better to leave the 85 on the camera even if it is turning dark but you are still creating an illusion of day.
Source lighting through the windows becomes much less complicated when the exterior does not have to be visible. Under these circumstances tracing paper is often used on the windows, and an 18K can be substituted by large 6000-watt HMI lights or nine-lights positioned just outside the windows. Such apparent daylight is fully controllable and stays the same all day long. The real daylight filtering in does not make much difference under these circumstances. The great advantages of lighting the inside with HMIs are the consistent daylight characteristics and the relatively cool temperature, allowing for greater comfort.
Location Lighting with Fluorescents
Many location interiors are illuminated with fluorescent tubes. This poses several problems for the cinematographer.
Ralph Woolsey, ASC
Warm white deluxe (WWX) is a standard fluorescent tube and generally available from large suppliers. It can be mixed with tungsten sources, as it is close to their color, plus a little added green. The plastic covers on many fixtures filter out most of this green. Cool white (CW) fluorescent is the most commonly found. It is daylight plus green and can be converted to tungsten balance through an FLB filter on the lens. (The filter combines an 85 with a .30 magenta to take out the green.) If you can’t afford the one-stop loss of the FLB, consider using at least a .20 or .30 CC magenta to remove the green and have the lab correct the rest. The results are somewhat better than a full fluorescent lab correction. This assumes that all sources of light are cool whites or the equivalent. If you have fluorescent lights visible in the shot and you cannot change them or overpower them, then of course you have to match most other lights to the fluorescents. Then you may have a problem with the exterior, if you see out the windows. There are available several types of tubes which are true daylight quality; they can be substitu
ted if there is enough work scheduled to make it pay.
One of my problem situations was a large architect’s office complex with over 600 cool white deluxe (CWX) tubes, which are halfway between tungsten and daylight, plus the usual green. There were also large windows all around. Ideally, a complete substitution with true daylight tubes was the answer, but only two days were scheduled there, and the cost would have been prohibitive. The solution was to use only HMIs, which we easily matched to the fluorescent, which was around 4000K, plus green. The real trick was matching the windows, because inside we were now lined up with CWX. But my digital 3-color meter computed the needed correction and confirmed that YF101 material would do the job. This stuff is for correcting yellow-flame carbons and comes in rolls only 30 inches wide, so our windows used up a lot of it. Even if not in a shot, they were covered in order to convert the incoming daylight to the CWX inside. No added ND was needed as we had plenty of interior illumination with the converted HMIs. Since there was plenty of light, an 81 EF filter on the lens plus a .20 CC magenta inside the Panaflex converted the CWX illumination directly to 3200K. When possible, I prefer to do the major correction this way during the initial photography, if for no other reason than to make the lab wonder how we did it without asking for their help.
On occasion mixing fluorescent with tungsten lights can add a certain documentary realism to the scene.
Richard Kline, ASC
If you have a mixture of fluorescent with daylight or with incandescent light, you have to figure out which way you want to go, because it is going to mix. Audiences are prepared now for a greenish look, so it is not as taboo as it was before. In fact, I almost welcome a natural look, where you will blend a little bit. Where daylight is one thing, incandescent is something else, and fluorescent is something else again. You have mercury vapor to work with and you have sodium. If it exists, I will use it as a source and then alter the lights with gels to fit it.
When we decide to use existing, location fluorescent light as our key illumination, we will need a portable frame of fluorescent tubes as fill light. Kino Flo offers fluorescent tubes in color temperatures closely matching 2900K, 3200K, and 5500K.
Theater Interior Lighting
Some location interiors incorporate very specific lighting, for example, a theater during a film projection. It is usually lit as an interpretation of the visual atmosphere rather than a realistic rendition. In a real situation people are flatly lit by the light reflected from the screen. The projector beam does not backlight the audience, and there is almost no light spilling from the projection booth through the portholes. Yet these are the effects which we usually try to incorporate. They are more realistic and justified in a small screening room like the scene from Blow Out photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond.
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
When I was shooting toward the screen, the light source was the screen, so people were backlit, silhouetted against the screen. When I shot toward the projector, I used a lot of backlight, as if it came from the projector and the booth. The booth was also lit.
I usually do not use the flickering effect on the people facing the screen because it looks phony. It also becomes very difficult to intercut. In real life a projection does not flicker. The flicker that you see in real life is caused by cuts where there is a light change, which happens a lot less frequently than the phony flicker effect. Flicker from a television set also looks phony. I prefer to establish the light source near the TV and I do a few light changes to give the effect of watching television.
Robert Jason, gaffer
Today we have computerized lights and lighting through dimmer boards, so you can get interesting effects on people’s faces by varying the flicker light or bouncing them into the screen and having them go off and on. It is much better now when they use a computer and developed programs. It is good for a fire, it is good for many things.
Ian Kincaid, gaffer
In The Aviator we were able to remove the real screen and we put up a muslin frame. We bounced off it an effect generated from the projection. We smoked the room and sent a projection through the smoke so we could see the effect. Our projectionist built a loop of dramatic light changes. It was not necessarily the real film. It was a loop of dramatic changes in projection, so one can actually see a shift, and then I tried to cue with it the bounce back. We used Dinos to bounce off the muslin, and then the light went through the silk onto the audience. The projection effect was more for the shape of the beam seen through the smoke.
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC
On Lust, Caution, the main character, Wong Chia Chi, often goes to the cinema. I decided not to backlight people at all, because when you look at the audience in a real cinema, you don’t see the light from the projection booth on the people. So I front-lit the audience through two 12 × 12 ft. frames with full grid cloth diffusion and Lighttools Soft Egg Crates on them. Each one of these frames was lit by three 10Ks. One 10K had a half CTB gel, one had a quarter CTB, and the third one had no color. They created different shades of cool light, and in front of each 10K I had fans, like the ceiling fans. Each 10K was flickering through the fans at a different rate, and on top of that I had grips moving solid black flags in front of the lights. So the light on each 12 × 12 frame would change shape and intensity as well as flicker. I placed these frames and 10K units in a position that wasn’t totally frontal—I cheated it a little bit to the side—to have a little bit of contrast and darkness on the faces of the audience. I think the result was quite realistic.
There was another cinema scene that was particularly tricky. Wong Chia Chi walks into a theater where she is meeting a fellow spy who has feelings for her. They meet about the assassination plot and are in danger of being caught, plus there’s the romantic tension of their relationship, so I wanted to add an edge in the lighting. I used a combination of screen light flickering a little bit cool cyan in color, combined with the red light emanating from a little exit sign on top of the doorway where they meet. So it is a combination of cyan and red light, which are opposites (or actually complementary colors), so there’s a very strong contrast of color in a dim, soft-lit situation. These lights are coming from opposite directions, one from the screen, the other from the door behind them. He is lit with red light on his face as he is facing the door. She is facing the screen, so she has a softer, cyan light on her. His energy is more urgent, so the contrast was also a way to represent what each one of them is feeling.
Vehicle Lighting
A commonly encountered location interior is the car. Planes, trains, and other moving vehicles are also common. When planning such a scene, an important decision is whether to shoot on location or on a soundstage setup with back projection. There is also a procedure called the poor man’s process for a night driving scene, where the effect of the moving vehicle is created by moving lights. After the great love affair with location in the late sixties and early seventies, filmmakers have tended to choose the comforts of a stage more often than not. Still, there are always many car, train, or plane scenes shot on location.
A car scene with back projection. The effect of passing lights is produced by white reflecting boards rotating in front of the lamps and by a lamp moving up and down on a boom.
Rosco Litepad HO. This daylight LED light is .3 in. (8mm) thick and is ideal for tight-lighting spaces such as inside a car.
(courtesy of Rosco Laboratories Inc.)
M. David Mullen, ASC
When using the poor man’s process technique for a night driving scene in a car, you need to first think about what would be the brightest sources of light in reality. Because if you are driving through the commercial district of a city at night, then the lighting in the car should feel darker than the lighting outside the car; you want the face to seem fairly underexposed relative to the background and most of the light hitting the face to appear to come from outside the car. But if the character is supposedly driving down a deserted country road at night, where there is no outdoor pract
ical light at all, then even in real life the dashboard light may be the brightest source hitting the driver’s face—unless the moon is particularly bright that evening. Hiding a light on the dashboard can be tricky though; the hands on the steering wheel will get too hot, the steering wheel itself can start to shadow the face, and if the light is too sharp, the uplighting on the face can look a bit ghoulish and unrealistic. Often I’ve resorted to using a Kino Mini-Flo car kit, softening the light with diffusion gel and powering it through the car’s DC outlet. You can dim the Mini-Flo if necessary, and you can use either a daylight or tungsten-balanced tube depending on the dashboard light color effect you want. You could also hide a Litepanels Mini or Micro LED unit there instead.
Rosco makes a daylight LED fixture called a Litepad; it is just an 8mm thick sheet of plastic, but it has tiny LEDs along the edges that cause the entire sheet to glow. You can easily tape it in front of a computer screen or a dashboard. It doesn’t put out much light but it is just enough to create a glow that is soft and shadowless. The plastic sheet is very tough; a person can step on it without breaking the light.
A rope light can also be used in a car interior, hidden along the window frame edges or across the dashboard.
John Buckley, gaffer
Inside the car, the LED works really well. With the LED you can make a wider pattern than from the Mini-Flo, so it becomes a bigger source, which is a good application. Mini-Flo ends up being a smaller source, so it becomes more spectral.
Film Lighting Page 31