How to create a believable dawn interior in a tiny location.

[Sridhar Kak]

Hi everyone,

I shot a dawn scene  that has the following sequence of events as shared below in the images :

IMAGE 1) Two men in a car approach a hut in a village at early dawn.

IMAGE 2)  One continuous shot (collage of few frames wiht beginning and end fraem too ) – Two men barge through the door and enter to find a man lying down and wake him up to confront. (conversational scene that happens for about a minute)

IMAGE 3 ) reverse two shot

IMAGE 4) The two men exit the hut and the sky opens up a little

Image 1 and 4 , the head and tail of the sequence respectively , which happens in exterior(early dawn when they arrive vs and a little shift in skylight when they exit), is pretty much the kind of look and feel  I wanted and quite happy how it turned out.

The interior portion is somethig I felt I failed at. My intention was to make the interior feel as though it is being lit almost entirely by the same dawn ambience coming through the window. The room was a 8×14 ft and the window was 3x2ft roughly.

For the window , I used a book light with a 1200B + two Nova 600 panels bounced into muslin, coming through a grid. I was around T2.8. The problem was that if I reduced the intensity to make the source feel more naturally distant/ambient, the room became too dark and we lost the actors. And no matter how much I softened outside , ulktimately the 3×2 window is the source and the characters postion relaitve to it isnt close, so the light ended up having that hardness too, which I dint want.

I tried putting a 2×3 Mat light with a grid cloth over it inside, angled above window as an extension to the main source, but it became visible in the frame and also started feeling artificial even at lowest intensity,  I also initially had some top/ambient fill, but it felt very artificial too as I was loking donw on the floor and one character so it didnt make sense, so I removed it and relied almost entirely on the window source.

Another problem was that in some of the wider shots, doors and other windows in the room (red clored door and window in Image 2)started catching quite a lot of highlight, making the lighting feel less like soft dawn ambience and more like a deliberately lit interior.

So my questions are:

1. Small real location:
When you’re working in a very small location, like in my case , where a single window has to provide both the motivation and essentially all of the exposure, how would you cheat the lighting to retain a believable dawn feeling?

2. Larger location / soundstage:
In a relatively large space or soundstage, how would you approach lighting a dawn interior when the actors are staged significantly away from the window, assuming the window is the only motivated source and there are no practical sources to motivate additional light, making it feel like dawn but not day.

 

 

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