Originally I’d thought about bouncing light off the tablecloth from above, but I opted not to do this for a number of reasons. Bouncing light off a low flat surface, like a table, is a great way to quickly light a space and make it look real. Soft uplight looks great on people placed around the table, and the glow from the table’s surface drops off quickly which helps create a sense of space and volume. Hard lights and lights with beams are wonderful tools for lighting at a distance and bringing out texture, but soft bounces and lights that simply glow define a space because they create soft areas of light that people and things can pass through. You can “feel” where they are in relation to objects and people in the frame.
But I didn’t do that.
I wasn’t sure I could hang enough lights over the table to get the amount of bounce light needed so instead I opted for two Maxibrutes popped over the back wall of the set and aimed through diffusion. I had some qualms about this as I wanted to keep the soft light from spilling down the wall; fortunately I had an excellent grip crew who took care of that for me. (This was a great opportunity for me to not have all the answers. I simply told my grips what I wanted, but not how to do it, and they did it faster and better than if I’d told them what to do. That’s an important thing to learn: hire good crew, tell them what you want, and get out of their way.)
The fill light is another Maxibrute, gelled with half CTS (Color Temperature Straw) and pushed through an 8’x8’ frame of grid cloth. CTS is a tough gel to work with in HD as it often “tips” over into green. Strong oranges are the same way. Yellow and orange are awfully close to green on a vectorscope and many cameras will accentuate that relationship in unpleasant ways. Fortunately the Phantom didn’t have this problem with this strength of CTS gel.
It’s nice that the fill is coming from the left as it blends nicely with the blue light on the left side of big brother’s face and then drops off into shadow on the right, giving him a bit of shape.
The window lights are 10k’s gelled with a combination of full CTO and half CTS. I first read about this formula in the American Cinematographer article about the movie “Fargo,” where the DP (Roger Deakins) sought to emulate sodium vapor lighting using tungsten units. The rich orange color really conveys the sense of streetlights outside a window.
Little brother was the focus of the shot and I wanted to pop him out from the others with an additional light. The most obvious motivated light source was the projector, but there was no way I could hide a light near the projector lens that would light the boy but not light the wall. (The wall had to remain dark so the video projector image, added later in post, appeared plausibly contrasty.) I opted instead to bounce a Firestarter par gelled with full CTB off a silver card taped to the floor. The blueish color sold the idea that he was being lit by spill from the projector, and even though the light was coming from below it was still coming from roughly the same direction as the projector and felt very natural.
Noise shows best in flat even surfaces, and DIT Jay Farrington noticed that the flat wall showed more noise than it did in any of our other shots. In order to reduce the amount of noise we changed the camera’s ISO to 160 and dropped our frame rate to 500 or 600fps. This didn’t reduce the noise at all, but as the shot didn’t contain as much dramatic motion as the others we opted to keep the frame rate anyway.
We went back to 1000fps for these two shots, which were completely gratuitous but really cool. These were primarily lit with a Maxibrute through thick diffusion (one or two frames of Lee 216) in order to create a nice soft highlight in the side of the pot. The liquid picked up the light nicely and looked a bit like liquid gold. The portion of the image containing the projector is a freeze frame as we discovered it didn’t put out red, green and blue light simultaneously. Instead it flickered through each color as it painted the frame with red, green and blue light in rapid sequence. Although the effect was very pretty it was also distracting.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you learned something new and interesting. This was a great learning experience for me, and I’m fortunate to have been able to pick the brains of a number of experienced colleagues before taking this shoot on. I also had a great crew to lean on, which is always the key to success.
Art Adams is a DP who likes to shoot quickly, even in slow motion. His website is at www.artadamsdp.com.
This was a fun setup. This is the same location where we shot the circuit boards. The background is lit by a 4’x4 tube Kino Flo, bulbed for 4300k, hung from the ceiling in front of the white board. I opted to cool the background down, as it seemed more interesting to make the white board a different color than white, and it helped to “pop” the person in the foreground by contrasting her warm flesh tones against a cool background.
There are two 1k fresnels aimed straight down into the conference table. A long time ago I discovered that the fastest, prettiest way to light an otherwise dull conference room was to bounce light off the table surface itself, as the light radiating upward created very interesting soft modeling on faces. In this case it beautifully lights the woman as she leans down to speak into the phone. We added a little fill from a Kino Flo out of frame to the right.
Bounced light from below the lens feels very much like “ambient” light to me, and I use it in a lot of situations where I don’t want the environment to seem lit.
The dolly move was done on the Skater Dolly. We didn’t have a real dolly in the budget that day so I proposed making the Skater Dolly do double duty. I love how the lens is so close to the table.
