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

Lighting Simply for the RED

In this shot the camera moves from behind the head of someone sitting in the foreground to reveal the front door and our actor. Here’s the lighting plot:

Shooting in a house built of dark wood is a dream. It’s easier to pop people and things by lighting them brightly against a dark background, and much more difficult to “unlight” bright backgrounds in order to draw attention to people and objects in front of them. A lot of my work is corporate marketing pieces shot in white conference rooms or on stages against white limbo, so having a dark rich background was a bit of a treat.

We lit our primary acting area with a 1200w PAR bouncing into an 8x8 Ultrabounce. Ultrabounce is the new rage, and rightly so: Gryflon is a great bounce material but it’s a little bit shiny, which can create unwanted specular reflections (I think we’re seeing a trend in my bounce preferences). Ultrabounce has a perfect matte finish. It glows, but doesn’t have a hot spot.

Due to the size of the room the PAR was pretty close to the Ultrabounce and didn’t fill it completely, so I asked for a 4x4 frame of Lee 250 (half 216) to be put in front of it. That spread the light over the entire Ultrabounce surface. There’s no point building a large bounce source and then only lighting the center of it, because then you have the possibility of an 8x8 source but the reality of a 4x4 source. If a 4x4 source is all you need then you’re better off using that size to begin with: you’ll save space and it’ll go up much faster. Otherwise, fill the entire source with light.

One thing to watch out for in this situation is that the frame of diffusion that you put in front of a light to spread it can then become another source of light. I could have had beautiful soft light from the 8x8 marred by a much smaller kick off the 4x4 diffusion. That didn’t happen here, but it’s something to keep in mind as it could take a couple of minutes to flag the 4x4 frame such that it’s not visible to the talent.

I’ll often stand in the talent’s position and look around to see what unwanted light sources are hitting me. That’s a great way to catch things like spill off the back of diffusion frames, light leaks through barn doors, hard sources that aren’t sufficiently flagged or black wrapped, etc. If you can stand on the actor’s mark and see a light, that light can see you—and it’s important that you only see the lights that you want hitting the actor.

The background sunlight “hits” were created by bouncing a 575w PAR into a piece of black foam core with bits of broken glass taped to it. Those “hits” didn’t pop the background much initially so we added a 4x4 floppy between the table lamp and the 8x8 bounce source in order to darken the background shadows and create some more contrast. Hits of bright sunlight against a bright wall don’t read so well, but hits of bright sunlight against a dark wall reads fine.

There was a window on the far side of the set that looked out onto blue sky, and that’s the blue highlight that you see in the post on camera right. I thought it was a nice touch so we left it alone.

That’s about it. We used two lights and a bit of grip gear and managed to pull off something really nice. Having the right location helps reduce lighting needs considerably, and we lucked out by finding such a nice place to shoot.

Thanks to a stellar crew who helped make this spot a reality, including director Tom Donald, key grip extraordinaire and occasional gaffer Todd Stoneman, camera assistant Phil Bowen and data wrangler Simon Sommerfeld.

Coming soon: an article about another RED shoot that was lit even simpler. Stay tuned!

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