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Dear Mr. Deakins,
thank you for putting these resources together its a real brain feast
I am curious how you approach lighting a new face. For example, one person with a motivated soft light like a window off to the side say, how do you approach structuring your cove of bounces?
John Alton wrote that he would move a test lamp around his subjects face first in order to fine the interesting angles for his light. Do you do this? Do you use the angle’s of a person’s jaw line, etc. to inspire your lighting direction?
thank you sincerely for all you have shared, its very thought provoking material.
-Lukáš
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When I started out I would usually have a hair and make-up test day that gave me the chance to study an actor’s face. And, yes, I would move a key light around just to see what effect it might have. Bear in mind that John Alton was lighting with more direct sources than I or most contemporary cinematographers use today so having some test time was even more essential for his method of working.
To experiment in that way on set, on the day of the shoot, creates all sorts of problems. Even if you were allowed the time by a director, actors tend to arrive on set intent to shoot. A camera rehearsal is sometimes frowned upon. It makes the physical similarities of a stand-in even more important.
While it would be so nice to have unlimited time to experiment, refine and perfect on the day, the race against time is part and parcel, and part of the fun too.
As you say lighting softly is more forgiving. And as its *generally* prettier and more ‘naturalistic’, its a wonder that the lighting style took so long to take hold, even though they had the firepower to achieve it even back in the days.
Thank you for your reply and again for providing this forum.
You say they had the firepower ‘back in the day’. They might in theory have had the firepower but it was really not realistic to use it. Until the advent of fast film stock, fast lenses and, eventually, HMI lighting it was prohibitively expensive to light a large set with a soft source. And before HMIs, or more recent LED lighting, a softly lit set would be hot! Some sets even burst into flames under ‘soft lighting’.
The reason I would use multiple directly focussed lamps to create a ‘soft’ source was not only to have control of where the light went. It would have be crazy expensive to do it any other way. LEDs and cameras that can be rated at 800, 2,000, 5000 ASA or more make such choices academic today.
Soft lighting was not uncommon in the Silent Era, between natural sunlight being used through cloth on outdoor stages to later when the Cooper-Hewitt lamps were being used. But first Cooper-Hewitts disappeared when sound came along (they were noisy) and to get enough exposure, multiple tungsten lamps were used which had larger bulbs in them (Mazda globes) so a push was made to make tungsten more “precise” in fresnel fixtures, less of a floodlit look was desired. And as film stocks got faster (about 32 ASA for Pan-X in the 1930s until 64 ASA Plus-X came along in 1938), one could do more careful projected lighting effects along with achieving more depth of field. So the classic studio style lighting evolved in the 1930s by choice, not because they didn’t know how to do soft lighting. And it worked well with b&w where you are trying to create depth and separation.
But soft lighting started to appear again in the 1960s on color films when the stock was 50 ASA. But it wasn’t easy to light larger spaces with soft light as opposed to just some close-ups. David Watkin famously lit the set for “Marat/Sade” with one big soft light window — which had 26 10Ks behind a frame of muslin. The African landscape set in “2001” was lit with hundreds of 1K globes. Even today if you ask for a couple hundred of space lights, tungsten or LED, to light a large set for overcast daylight, you will be fighting with the production manager to spend that much money.
I think it’s this experience of fighting at the margins to achieve something special that’s so interesting. To me one of the most fun parts of the job/game is when the margins of error are small, when your resources are limited and you can only ‘just’ make a vision happen (but you can!). The constraints of time and money push any production into this territory, no matter how fast the film speed, or efficient the lights are, how big a project. Your story of lighting the basin in NCFOM is a good case in point.
I think people like me are fascinated by the history because you all worked with such slimmer margins, that you had to hone all your skills of calculation and knowledge of the tools that much more. (It is nice we don’t have to worry about melting an actor’s face off anymore)
That transition into using soft-light more generally seems like a concrete example of you guys doing the math each movie, and finding successively along the way that hey, we can now ‘just barely’ do this awesome thing, let’s do it.Thank you again for sharing your thoughts
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