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Cinematography
Director of Photography
Lighting
Professional Toolkit
Studio Shoot
Year 2
Lighting - a lot of new ground to cover
As head of the camera department and the visual look of the film it was very important that I got lighting right. Lighting can make or break a film, and can be the difference between a shoddy "student film" and a professional film. So once the storyboard was finished Umor (Gaffer) and I spent a lot of time on set imagining how we wanted to light the film. This posed a lot of challenges as it was the first time either of us had properly done lighting (outside of lighting workshops and minor personal projects.) And as this is our biggest film to date we wanted to do do it justice.
We had to create five different moods; morning, day, early night and dark night; for scene six, as we wanted scene seven to be even darker, and ultimately we had to create the hospital lighting. At first we tried reasoning ourselves to a solution with the knowledge we both had of studio lighting, but we didn't really get anywhere until we asked Anne for help. She told us that it was important that we have enough light on our actors faces, as to give the shots a nice look. We took this piece of advice and created a very basic lighting plan.
It had two studio light which we would use for modeling the actors faces, and one light shining through the window to act as daylight, moonlight/street lamp. We later realised that this would not be enough as there were a number of things we had not taken into consideration. Firstly we had a talk with Preston and Arturs, they had some ideas and concerns which we had to address. Mainly that the light shining through the window would not be enough to light up the room at all point during the shoot, as it would have to move, because the sun also moves in real life. We did some changes, but decided that we were still not done. We then had a talk with Chris, who is the studio supervisor, and he had some ideas that ended up using - primarily a large piece of poly roughly at the fourth wall, that would act as a fill for the entire scene. This gave us a set that was dimly illuminated, and easier to work with. After this we could start working out what our key light was (usually the one behind the window) and what gels we could use to create the different times of the day.
We ended up using this design:
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| The daytime scene |
So we could not aim two 2ks at the poly to create a fill (we could alternate this for the other scenes as to create different effects, and add gels for the night and morning.) We had the 5k behind the window shining daylight through the blinds that we put over the window. This created a pattern on the wall that further created the illusion of daylight. And lastly we had the house lamp and the desk lamp on set to create an even more realistic feel.
On the second day of shooting we made slight changes to the morning lighting plan as we felt it need to be a little bit different from the rest. We had used the light through the blinds on the day and night scenes, and it wouldn't make sense for the sun to be shining through the same window during the morning too. Therefore we created a door on the fourth wall that would let a slit of golden light into the room. This worked really well.
Thoughts:
All in all I am really happy with the way we met the challenges and solved them. Umor was a great Gaffer to have, and him and Ollie (who helped us out) were an amazing help during the shoot. We definitely learned a lot, at least I did. I realise now how important it is that the DoP knows his lighting and how he wants the film to be lit, because if not you end up with a lot of back and forth without anyone actually knowing where this is headed. I don't think I did a bad job with the lighting, but it had to be a collaborative effort with multiple people on the crew because I was working it out. Towards the end of pre production, the set building, and the shoot, I felt like I had better control, and was able to properly instruct how I wanted the lighting to look.
-TJ
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