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Filed under: Cameras •Lighting •Post Production •Production •Tips •

Low-Budget PSA’s, Shot on RED, Prove that Budget is Not a Barrier to Excellence

Here’s the first shot of “Lineup”:

And here’s the first lighting setup:

I exaggerated an old moonlight trick to create a stylistic industrial look: some of the prettiest and most interesting blues have a lot of green in them, and a common recipe for night lighting calls for 1/2 CTB and 1/4 plus green gels for a cool-but-not-pure-blue feel. Another variation is to use 1/2 CTB and the old arc correction gel White Flame Green, which creates a silvery moonlight that can be stunningly beautiful.

In this case I wanted a not-so-subtle mercury vapor lighting look, so we swapped all the Kino Flo tubes to daylight (5600k) and put 1/2 plus green on the unit itself, along with some diffusion (probably Lee 250). By setting the white balance at 4300k (not 3200k—ignore the white balance temp in the diagram) I not only compensated for my Schneider 1/2 CTB filter (which converts 3200k light to 4300k) but the 5600k light goes a little cool and the 3000k light goes a little warm. I’m white balanced exactly between them.

If the woman were to look up she’d see the Kino Flo directly over her head—which means that her face would get little front light from it. The cop in the background, on the other hand, would see the unit stretching out in front of him. That’s why he is lit very softly, with a lot of blue-green light wrapping around his face, while her face is mostly lit from inside the room.

Using lighting in this way helps to define a 3D space in a 2D medium and is a very easy way to create interest. Even though we can’t see it there’s clearly a light over them: she’s in front of it in space, and he’s behind it.

Lighting the foreground warm and the background cool also creates a classic warm/cool color contrast, which is a very interesting look. Warm colors tend to attract our attention and make objects seem closer, while cool colors tend to reduce interest and seem farther away.

The lighting effect is most dramatic when the woman steps up to the window in complete shadow, at which point the inside lights come on. (In this edit that light change is hidden by the fade up at the beginning of the spot.) I had a 4’x8’ bounce card rigged inside the room, laying on the desk inside with two lights aimed at it. (It’s the same room used for the last shot of the previous spot, “Perp,” and we’re just looking into the window that the previous character was looking out of.) The 650w fresnel spotted into the card is there to provide a little glow to the inside of the room and provide a hint of light to the woman’s face as she enters frame, while the 2k (operated by a film student I’ve been mentoring, Ted Allen) provides most of the light when she lands on her mark. The subtlety of the 650w was lost in the edit, which happens quite often; the important thing, though, is to try to add those little touches when possible because we never really know how the edit is going to turn out until it’s done. It’s better to add a nice little touch and not see it used than to miss an opportunity and then stare at that gaping creative hole every time you see the finished product. (Such touches, though, are easily sacrificed if the schedule doesn’t allow for them. Fine brushstrokes are nice, but broad brushstrokes are most important. The faster you can paint with the broad strokes, the more time you’ll have for the fine strokes.)

There’s a piece of black foam core leaning against the wall on the other side of the window to make the reflections more noticeable. We also enhanced the window reflection in post by selecting it with a rectangular window in Color and increasing the exposure inside it.

Here’s a slightly different angle:

You can see the subtle intermixing of colors on the actress’s face. I really like that look. The cop’s face in the background is a nice contrast. You can also see the sharpening we added in Color to enhance our gritty look. (This was shot on a 135mm Zeiss Ultra Prime, probably at T2.)

Here’s what the setup looked like:

The nicest wide shot included some plasterboard wall on the side of the window toward the camera, so we put Duvetine up against the side of the window to make the wall go black. You may notice that the tilt angle of the camera alines with the actors’ heads. (The piece of paper on the wall is a lighting diagram left over from my Tiger Lilies shoot on the same stage.)

Our other setup showed the actual lineup, which included a couple of actors from the previous spot plus a crew member. Ian originally sent me this still to illustrate the look he wanted:

I took one look and knew exactly what to do:

Soft light from below can be very flattering, but in this case we over-sharpened the image and cranked up the contrast to make it look a bit sinister. Here’s a behind-the-scenes still:

My film student, Ted, is on the left. (He was drafted at the last minute because he fit a certain age demographic we didn’t have cast.) And here’s a color-graded screen grab:

As you can see, Ian and I like vignetting our images. (The vignette looks a lot more subtle on a video monitor than it does here.) Don’t let anyone tell you that you can never light “flat” by putting a big soft source near the camera. Depending on the size of the source, what side of the lens axis it’s coming from, and how far off-angle to the lens it is, it’s possible to create a large number of very interesting, rich and subtle looks.

The trick with a lighting setup like this is to light the bounce cards as evenly as possible so there’s one shadow, not two. If the lights are too spotty or too close to the cards they’ll create two hot spots, one at either end of the card, which results in double shadows. There’s a little bit of a double shadow in the midst of this shot but it’s not horrible.

Ideally we’d have evenly lit the cards with a row of Lowell Tota-lights placed in a row on the ground, but as we didn’t have any we punted with the 2k’s. It worked fine. It’s important to understand what’s important and what’s not important in a lighting setup, and in this case we were able to get 90% of what was necessary quickly with two lights instead of five or six.

We did the dolly move on a doorway dolly, which was not the best method possible but it was what our budget allowed. We really needed track to make the move useably smooth, but as we didn’t have any we used the unsteadiness of the move to simulate the woman’s POV as she looks down the lineup.

One last note: we shot this spot in 16:9 but Ian cropped it to 2.4:1 “scope” letterbox during the edit. Normally I don’t like having my work reframed in post, but I have to admit that it looks great. There are exceptions to every rule, and the rule of “don’t touch my footage!” sometimes gets in the way of someone else’s creativity making the piece better. I don’t encourage this, but I also take credit when it works.

That’s about it. Very simple overall, although it took a while for me to learn to light that way. Lighting simply pays huge dividends: fast and pretty are popular modalities both in cinematography and in dating, and both can result in a lot of callbacks—albeit for different reasons.

All original photos are copyright 2009 their respective owners, who in this case are Tim Blackmore/Meets the Eye and Luke Seerveld.

Art Adams is a DP who is fast and pretty, but in a very different way from how he was 20 years ago. His website is at www.artadams.net.

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Nice work Art!  Love the grades!

Posted by mikeburton  on  01/21  at  01:20 PM

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Hi Art!

Very nice article as all you usually write. Beautifull and simple photography.
I have a question regarding the first set up:  why did you use the 1/2 CTB Schneider filter on the lens? Why not just set de Vista Beam with the 5600 tubes, if the idea was to fully expose the blue channel and avoid noise?
Was it an aesthetic or technical decision?

I´d like to take this opportunity to thank you for all the things that I have learnt from you. I always follow you here and on CML.
Truly thanks for your didactic way of explaning..
Regards,
Marco Mora,
Starting to DPing some stuff,
Caracas, Venezuela

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  03/24  at  11:58 AM

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