Search Results for 'no'

[rama lingam]

If my window have a glass I will get some light from there. Those boys watching tv, and smoking. I would like to play with dim day light. The house is small. I believe there is not much practical lamps in that kind of middle class houses. That’s my worry. We can’t just out the bed kamp or table lamps for all types of houses. In foreign practical lights very common. But here is not like that.

[MarcoFerri]

Do you mean that it has to feel like is daytime? in that case I would choose a wall and call it your blind spot and then create a fake windows from there.

On the other hands if the boys are deliberately smoking in a dark room even tho is daytime you have to treat the scene like a night time. In this case the main source of light can be a practical light or a dim light coming from the closed windows.

I find myself struggling when the scene doesn’t give me much hints about light sources… that is when I have to invent in my head the main source that become my keylight.

Try not to think about the technique but find what it might be lighting the boys in real life instead and try to recreate it. Also practicals can help you solving this process.

 

[Mtm48]

I notice in lighting plots there are rows of light fixtures. I would assume those lights would blend in together to create an appearance one pool of light? How do avoid creating multiple shadows and how far apart do you decide to space these lights?  Thanks!

[rama lingam]

Dear master Roger how to light a day interior when doors and windows closed. The scene call for two doors and windows closed. Groupe of teen age boys smoking cigar and drinking without their parents know Anything. There is no window source and door way to light the subject. Where to start? May I hung some lights on ceiling. But it’s not logical source when door and windows closed. I am gonna use nano prime lenses and sony fx3 camera. We don’t have enough budgets.

[Abraham]

Hello everyone,

Last week we released a new episode of the Team Deakins Podcast. This one featured production sound mixer Peter Kurland, who has worked on films from NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN to WALK THE LINE.

After listening, feel free to discuss the episode with each other below!

[MaksimSobolev]

Hello everyone,

I am a student at a cinema school, and in April, we will be shooting a 10-minute short film on a beach about the relationship between a dying father and his daughter, as they spend an entire day camping on the beach. It might remind some of you of the movie Aftersun. I have a lot of questions, so if someone could reply to even just one of them, I would be very thankful!

I am a DOP for the first time on a “big” project, and I would love to receive some tips or inspiration on how to make the lighting look good. We have 4 days of shooting, and my main concern is that the sunlight might appear “flat” for most of the day, especially around noon. I am pretty much limited to using diffusors and reflectors, as we don’t have an electric point nearby for projectors (though we do have some battery-powered LEDs that last around 2 hours).

I also want the lighting to reflect the relationship between the two characters: at the beginning, they are afraid to talk about the father’s illness and are distant. Throughout the day, they gradually become closer until the campfire scene in the evening, where they openly discuss the father’s illness. Do you think I can achieve a sense of progression by playing with the contrast on their faces or the hardness of the sunlight? Or should I focus solely on reflecting the time of day? As I mentioned, we have 4 days of shooting, so I need to maintain continuity between the scenes, as the story occurs throughout an entire day.

My second concern is the campfire scene. We are not sure if we have the right to make a campfire, so I am already working on plan B. One of my teachers suggested using an Astera LED tube with a fire simulation. Do you think this will be enough and believable? I also thought of using a small projector with a diffusor to strengthen the light.

Finally, we have 2 car scenes: one at the very beginning, and the other at the very end. Both have morning light, but the second one should be REALLY beautiful to show the evolution between the characters. How can I make that difference between the two? I thought of using a pinkish morning light. Can I achieve that with the few projectors we have?

I’ve seen many references to inspire me, but I always have to deduce what lights are used, and I am afraid of being wrong (also, we don’t have permission to test projectors outside of school, so I have to prepare everything mentally, hence all my questions).

If someone wants more information, I would be happy to discuss it! (and pardon me for my bad english).

[Stip]

 Let’s say you are lighting a face for a ratio, say 4:1 or something. Does metering the contrast levels reference the LOG image, or the image after converted to rec709,etc.? For example if you do use a light meter to light these ratios exactly, will converting to 709 or P3 crush those levels even more?

Different manufacturers have different LOG curves but they all only serve the technical purpose of storing the best possible information into a compressed file. LOG is not ‘viewing ready’. It needs to be converted in an image that our eyes perceive as ‘normal’ (display), only then contrast ratios will represent what you have measured on set.

To do that you need to know what color space / gamma your monitor is in and use the appropriate conversion. Your external camera monitor might be Rec.709, your Macbook Air would need a Apple P3 (P3 D65 + sRGB gamma) conversion and so on.

[gx42]

Yeah definitely makes sense! Now this brought up another interesting thought, which I am probably overthinking but am curious about anyways haha.

Let’s say you are lighting a face for a ratio, say 4:1 or something. Does metering the contrast levels reference the LOG image, or the image after converted to rec709,etc.?

For example if you do use a light meter to light these ratios exactly, will converting to 709 or P3 crush those levels even more?

I can now see an issue using false color to set contrast ratios because you would be setting them for the LOG image. And then after converting to a given color space, it could increase the ratio levels. Is this correct or am I misinterpreting?

I’m not sure the right way to ask this question but hopefully this makes sense. It may not even matter if you go by the meter, but I’m now curious how contrast ratios would be affected between the log file and the colored image.

[LucaM]

As always, since i’m just an amateur working on a little project i don’t think that my opinion is particularly relevant, but even in my little i try to take inspiration from Roger’s masterpieces. But i came to the conclusion (and it happened many times, in other completely different contextes) that, while it’s highly interesting and informative to know how Roger (or other great cinematographers) created a given scene, the point is not doing the same thing , but thinking in the same way.  At least it works for me, i can’t speak for anyone else. But if i just try to copy something i can obtain, at best, a decent copy. If i try to think in the same way of someone that created something i really like, in that moment i understand and learn. Of course there’s some subjectivity in it, but an educated  guess is better than no guess.

So, my humble advice : study that scene from Skyfall and try to guess why Roger did this or that, not just what he did. If your goal is creating an exact copy of that scene do it, but perhaps i think it would make an even better impression to show that you can create a scene – even a different one  – in the same way Roger would. Just my opinion!

[kakaluote]

Hello, Mr Deakins!

First of all, i really want to thank you for providing us a so great place to talk with you even though my english is terrible(forgive me). Continuous take is a very special and important way of showing film’s power. in a period of time, continuous take looks like a little popular in filmmaking, but give us some very great films in cinematography indeed, including your film”1917″, “bird man” and so on. but i found out andrei tarkovsky shoot a continuous take in almost his every film, it is very rare. as he said, he want to record the passing of time, his take recorded that something falling down after actor has left.  Maybe i was wrong, but i think he could catch the nature of  image just from very normal things. his shooting way is a little far away from narrative.  He is good at controlling details to express theme and found out visual subtext in every take as much as he can. The painting “The Hunters in the Snow” in the film “Solaris” is a great example. Of course, budget maybe also a reason to make him find out a very concise way to finish shooting, just like robert bresson. image texture and thrilling of life could be shown in his film, especially his edit, sound, color, movement, light. what do you think of his film? i hope my question won’t make you mad and angry. finally i have to apologize for my so terrible english. Wish you all the best！ Thanks！

[lukas_hyrman]

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

[ben_r_05]

Hello,

Thank you for your reply, I apologise for my late response. To demonstrate my ability to light a sequence, I am replicating this scene, and with the knowledge I have gained from the exercise and research I am undergoing, I will then create my own version of the sequence with different lighting techniques and compare the 3, explain why I made certain choices etc.

[dmullenasc]

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.

[Roger Deakins]

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.

[Stip]

As David said, LED technology is advancing fast. You can get very affordable units today that render good and accurate enough colours. If you get a relatively new LED light by one of the established LED film-light manufacturers, I don’t think you need to worry about color rendition these days.