Treating Windows

[Tyler F]

Hey Roger and Site,

Sorry if this is a repost—I was watching Sicario last night and wanted to know how you go about treating your Day Int. windows when they play in a shot.

I read that in BR2049 at the farm, you had some large bounces some feet away from the windows and had units directly lighting the bounces, is this the same approach? Or are you directly applying diffusion to the windows and lighting them up?

Topic

[Roger Deakins]

This scene in Sicario was shot on location and I wanted to maintain the sense of the outside, if leaving it intensely bright. The Sapper Morton farm interior was a stage set and I had a wire mesh added to the windows so that they maintained some texture rather than being white squares. In both cases the main source of the light was coming from outside and was artificial. The sunlight was a PAR lamp bounced off a mirror.

[Tyler F]

Ah that makes sense and thank you for answering that. So for the second shot as an example, are you intentionally letting the window ‘blow out’ for the scene—as in, was there an actual background to be seen, albeit many stops over your shooting stop, and you didn’t set up any sort of big bounce card to act as a bright outside exterior?

The reason for asking is that I had recently wrapped a feature on a stage and couldn’t really achieve this look due to not being heavily resourced enough. I figured the easiest way would be to take an ultrabounce card pulled away some feet from the window, punch a lamp into it from low angle, and above the card i’d have a bigger unit angled down punching sunlight down into the room.

[Ryan Jackson]

Hi Roger, what was the reason for using the mirror to reflect the PAR for the sunlight and was the mirror used for all of these shots? Was it to change the quality of the PAR or simply due to limited space? Thank you.

[Roger Deakins]

There was another building close to the window so I used a mirror to double the distance. It also served as a cut to shape the light.

[Author]

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