Robert Baumgartner, cinematographer and gaffer
For inside the car daytime shooting, Chris Menges taped muslin on the hood of the car and inside had white bedsheets everywhere the camera didn’t see—on the laps of actors, on the floor, taped to the dashboard. A little black duvetyn here and there and off we would shoot, with no ND gel on the widows, no lights from the camera car. It looked great.
Colin J. Campbell, gaffer
Car shots can be fun. Balance is difficult, and the environment changes as you drive. Sometimes it is worth trying to use the sun to light the inside of the car. Bouncing the daylight into the car off muslin on the hood, seats, or anyplace that makes sense, including the actor’s lap, can do this. Then the light level adjusts itself when you are driving through sun or shade. You go under a tree, it gets a little darker; then you come out, and it gets brighter. You probably still need a little artificial light to handle the darkest bits, but it is a good look. And you don’t get caught in the situation where the light that you used to balance in full sunlight suddenly is too bright when you go into shadows.
It is very easy for the scriptwriter to write “lonely road at night.” But it is not so easy to shoot. The only light source is the moon and the dash lights. Dash light as a source is not so good: the hands are too bright, the angle is not good. You may be better off trying to drift the light from a farther distance, make it less source, and change the density as the car travels. If you can get them, headlights of oncoming cars really help, but that word lonely may stop that idea.
Matthew Libatique, ASC
For a poor man’s process, we used black silk behind, on the rear window of the car, with modulating lights behind the silk, to distort the focus. A handheld camera provided unevenness. In Iron Man we had Dedos rigged straight down off a rotating motorized pipe rig that spun the light over the car, creating the illusion of streetlights reflecting in the windscreen.
Wally Pfister, ASC
With someone in a car at night, I want him to be at least two stops under, because I want to feel the real ambience. That’s my reference.
Kino Mini-Flo
(courtesy of Kino Flo Inc.)
For a poor man’s process in the car, I put a side soft key on the driver side and I have someone wave the flag through that, so that it is going up and down and it is soft. For the fill light I’ll either bring something through the windshield—but that can get very fussy—or I’ll use Mini-Flos. Mini-Flos are terrific because you can put a couple of them there, you can turn them off. We put them all over the place, wherever we need them. The other trick that we do, we take PAR cans way back behind the car, and we’ll put some color on them, maybe some orange, maybe some red, and pan those to create interactive lights, like car lights, streetlights.
For the day we almost always go with a camera car and a flatbed car. I usually key from the driver’s side, for whatever reason. I use the light because I want control, but I find myself often putting black up on most of the windows in the car. Just to get mood into it. Often, if I am shooting through the windshield, let’s say it is a single driver, I’ll put a key source on the driver’s side. I’ll try to soften it as much as I can, and then, on the passenger side and some of the back windows and the part of the windshield that the camera is not seeing, I’ll put black. This way I can get some mood going. All the areas that we will see outside I’ll leave open. It is like a negative fill.
James Plannette, gaffer
When you are driving on city streets at night, you need to put a little light on the people in the car but not too much. And I always like it coming from outside rather than inside. In Traffic we did a shot with Michael Douglas driving through Cincinnati, and Steven Soderbergh was handholding the camera in the passenger seat. We put a Mini-Flo on the steering wheel, in the center of the steering column. An important thing is that the shot has to be two stops underexposed. If it is anywhere near the correct exposure, then it looks lit. But if it is a stop and a half or two stops under, then you never think about it. We plugged this Mini-Flo into the cigarette lighter and then we covered it with full grid and an N6. We were shooting on 5289, which was 800 ASA. You look at the driver and you look at the background and balance to the background. He drove through the city and you would swear that he was driving without any lights. You could see his expressions and you could see his concerns, but he didn’t look lit.
In the daylight situation I will sometimes put something white on a hood so that the sun bounces and gives a slight amount of fill. It doesn’t take much. You want the outside to be somewhat brighter. It is good if it is a piece of a white sheet. It’s good to be shooting toward the south side of the street so the fronts of the structures are not very bright.
Harris Savides, ASC
I like the poor man’s process for night stuff, but to do it well you need more time than you usually have. Otherwise, in the nighttime I ask to shoot in streets that are brighter than normal. I’ll use a trailer for the car and I’ll bounce a light into something in the front, just to modulate it, very slowly. In a day scene I prefer to shoot in a very simple way and not to use trailers and trucks with lights. I prefer to sit in a back seat, hold the camera, and just shoot that way. I have a trick: if I pull the film in the lab, the highlights are more stable. The whites come down a little bit. I read the guy and I stop it down one or two stops. It feels natural. So I am pulling and I am taking my exposure two stops under what I have in the car.
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC
We had a night-driving scene in State of Play where we are inside a limo, with Ben Affleck and Robin Wright Penn. To capture the political world in the movie, I used the Genesis camera (high definition) for this scene, as for all the scenes with Congressman Collins. I basically lit the same way I would have on film, but with lower light levels so I was able to capture the exterior architecture. We were towing the vehicle and I had electricians moving lights on poles outside the car, passing one bulb with a sodium light, another bulb with metal halide, just moving them by hand so you had the shadows moving past the faces of the actors. I had a couple of Rosco LitePad panels with ND gels and nets inside the car for fill, plus a little bit of color correction gels because LitePads tend to be blue-green. Very, very low light, so it looked quite natural. If I was shooting on film inside the car, I would probably use the same lighting, but in this case I put a lot of NDs, so for example I had the metal halides and the sodiums wrapped with ND9. The key light was the moving bulbs, while the inside fill light was around two stops under key. Shooting this scene on HD allowed us to have more detail on what was visible outside the car by lighting the interior with extremely low light levels.
On Babel there is a night-driving scene in the Mexican desert, so I needed to light the interior of the car with no apparent light source. Inspired by a technique used by Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron on Collateral, I used thin metal pads used in cellular phones with phosphorus on them, excited by electricity from a battery. We put these things inside the car, all around, on the back of the seats and on roof and sides, as well as the dashboard and glove compartment, so it was a very low intensity, enveloping, shadowless ambient light. I added a bit of light from the exterior of the car, as if the headlights were bouncing off the pavement and coming in through the windshield. For this I rigged a two-lamp 4 ft. Kino Flo on the hood of the car, diffused with full grid cloth. On the sides of the car, we rigged two 1K redheads to light the sides of the highway like the headlights of the car would, and on the back we had two more redheads with red gel on them to simulate the glow from the stoplights of the car.
It was all based on observation. When I am in a car on a dark highway and I look to the back, I don’t see any source of light, but I still can see. I don’t see any shadows, and I don’t feel where the light is coming from, it is just ambient. So I was trying to reproduce that. I enjoy doing night driving shots because you get the opportunity to play with the movement and color of light.
What I don’t like that much
are the day interiors in cars. That is more about resolving problems than anything else. It is very time-consuming. For day I basically try to do it as natural as possible. Usually I’ll light from the front, maybe a 4K PAR through a 4 × 8 ft. full grid cloth diffusion, as close as I can get it to the windshield. If I don’t see the windshield through camera, I’ll put it right on it so it is completely soft. If it is free driving and we are looking to the front, I’ll use, for example, Jokers with small Chimeras positioned on the sides.
On Babel we had a situation in Tokyo when the father is talking to his daughter in the car, and we were not allowed to tow the car or do any lighting, so I insisted on having a car with a sunroof. We were not even allowed to shoot on the highway, so what we ended up doing was stealing the shot, filming through the open door of a van driving next to the car. We wanted to see Tokyo in the background and we wanted to see them, so the sunroof helped balance the light of the interior of the car to the exterior, thus avoiding having the characters as silhouettes or the background blown out.
Haskell Wexler, ASC
One of the things which I learned from working on the documentary on the bus (Bus Rider’s Union) is that a lot of the equipment that we use when lighting inside cars is basically unnecessary to get good results. If you can control the intensity of the background with neutral density gels on the windows in the shot, it is possible to use the natural existing daylight in the car to make perfectly acceptable shots. This lighting may be further helped by bouncing some light into the people’s faces. The only advantage of lighting inside the car is consistency. If you have a long scene which is supposed to look the same way for a long time, it is necessary to include your own sources of lighting, because you cannot count on the daylight or the direction of the road to help you.
One of the problems of lighting daylight inside the car, when shooting through the windshield, is getting sky reflections on the windshield. The way it is usually done in TV productions when they have to do it “fast and dirty” is to put a black tent over the top of the windshield and keep all the reflections out, making it possible to shoot regardless of what the daylight is doing. In other words, the people inside the car are lit by a light that is coming from outside, either a nine-light or an HMI hitting some paper reflector. The light that normally hits the windshield, which gives the reflections, is blocked with an awning that goes from the top of the car, so what you see reflected in the windshield is the black cloth. If you like the audience to be conscious of the fact that there indeed is a windshield there, you have to drive on a road with an angle that does not cause the daylight to obscure the subject’s image completely. An ideally suitable road would have trees hanging over it. Then you have a nice effect of shadows and light and movement on the windshield, like having a series of dissolves going on. Sometimes you can also use a pola screen to cut the reflection out.
There seems to be now a lot more use of rear projection for car scenes. I am certainly very much in favor of night shooting this way, for scenes of any duration, because you can get a perfect sound. Basically all that you can see out of the car at night are lights, so with good plates [back projection footage], you can do a nice job.
Trains have different power than your lights, so you would probably take your battery packs with you. If you are just going to shoot for a few hours on the train, to do a small scene, I am sure that you can work with a light card and two or three HMI guns for the daytime. It is also good whenever you have a situation like that to have neutrals (ND gels) with you, so that if you have some windows which throw everything completely out of balance, you are able to deal with it.
For the most convincing car photography, choosing a suitable road is as important as the lighting. Often artificial lighting can be minimized when proper shooting angles are established.
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
Many people use too much light inside the car. You make fewer mistakes having people in silhouette and having less light on them. It is more natural.
Most of the car interiors are done in controlled situations like pulling the action car with a camera car equipped with batteries and lights. There is one angle in a car very difficult to light. That is when the people are sitting in the front seats and the camera is shooting from the back seat or through the rear window.
The most controlled situation is, of course, on the stage using rear projection. You can have rear projection combined with another projected image reflected on the windshield. One plate [back projection footage] is prepared for the background and another plate is shot of the neons and street signs to project onto the windshield. It gives an extremely realistic look.
In an airplane, you can almost use only the existing light or existing light augmented by a little bit of a bounced light, virtually available light. If you are shooting in a plane on the ground and you try to simulate flying, you can move a lamp up and down to create the illusion of the sunlight moving. You can float the camera up and down and sideways on two fluid heads joined together.
From these and the following statements we see how much thought and ingenuity goes into lighting the insides of vehicles to convey the realistic character of these confined spaces. However, in spite of the convenience of shooting using a back projection in the studio, many scenes are shot on location for a more realistic look.
James Crabe, ASC
Every picture has sequences with automobiles, so it is something you have to deal with. Sometimes you take a handheld camera inside the car and do close-ups that way, but usually you are using such a short lens that it is not very flattering to people. Some camera cars can tow the subject car alongside, so that you can get a decent two-shot that way and it is much easier than putting rigs up. You also have the problems of reflections in the windshield, which generally are to be preferred, ever since Polanski’s Knife in the Water. Reflections in the windshield look interesting if one does not mind the fact that there is supposed to be glass between the speaking actor and the camera. Some directors feel that if you are shooting through glass, you should not hear the people terribly clearly.
Car stuff is tedious. I am sure that there are people, grips and others, who have fast ways of putting cameras on cars. But it always seems to be a major production. Of course, in car scenes people are leaning forward and leaning back, and to keep that alignment so that they are not covering one another and to figure out where you should place the focus takes some effort. Because usually there is not enough depth of field if it is a very tight two-shot to hold both subjects sufficiently in focus. So it is just a drag. If you are shooting at night and you want to see the streetlights, in order to keep them in balance, you probably have to light your foreground characters at 12 foot-candles or something very little in order that the background won’t be wasted or so out of balance that it isn’t doing you any good. I found in situations like that that sometimes a bounce card can be very effective. Of course this depends on whether or not the car is being towed or actually driven. If the car is being actually driven by an actor, as was the case in Save the Tiger with Jack Lemmon, who happened to be a very good driver, it is also quite dangerous, because you’ve got guys hanging on the car and you have a driver who has lights in his eyes and is trying to drive at night. But we found that I could sit up on the hood of the car and just occasionally direct a baby (1K) at the white cardboard and then take it off. The cardboard would be in front but not so much in front that he could not still see a little bit. Most people would not be able to do it. Jack was a really good driver.
I always thought that it would be wonderful to be able to do scenes where the sun is really so low that you can use the real sun coming in the car and hitting people, but if you are working in cities and streets where buildings abound, that just doesn’t seem to happen a lot. And when it does, when you get those wonderful bursts of hot backlight that really comes in and pierces through the rest of the scene, it is very believable and very realistic, even if it is several stops hotter than what you’ve got goi
ng on inside.
With process screen, no matter how you slice it, whether using front, rear projection, or matte, the background becomes a generation farther away than the foreground. It works wonderfully if you are looking through windows that have a little dirt on them or drops of water, or rain is going or some other effects.
I find, in commercials at least, one very handy thing that we carry with us all the time: It is a small surface mirror, a foot square. If we want to see the guy driving a truck, we just put that mirror with a piece of clay, stick it onto the dashboard, and then take a handheld camera, and now you can be shooting through, past the gearshift, you can get shots you could not get any other way. We are shooting into the mirror. This has to be flopped later in the lab.
The direction of light for the car interior is not much of a problem during the day. After all, cars have windows all around. At night it becomes more problematic. The old-fashioned approach with a very bright dashboard is not quite realistic. Gaffers and cinematographers use various light units in various places to create believable lighting and the correct mood.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
In a daytime situation we want the light to come through the window. The driver gets his primary light through the windshield and a little bit from the side, so you try to simulate it. You try to key him from the front if possible. A big fay twelve-light with a diffusion on it will be rigged on the hood, near the camera, giving a big soft fill through the windshield. If you use two or three cameras for coverage, the light will be hemmed in between them. It sounds very flat, but I think that if you get the intensity right, it looks like a very normal light coming through a windshield, its angle is justified, and it always looks clean. With only one camera on the hood, you can put the light more to the side.
Film Lighting Page 32