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I don’t know if my experience is relevant since I started making films in the 1980s, but I started out with one powerful light I got in a garage sale for five dollars — an open face 650W tungsten movie light made for Super8 home moviemaking in the 1970s. (When the bulb finally burned out several years later, I found out it cost thirty dollars to replace it.) I was shooting Super8 back then, mostly slow stocks — Kodachrome 40 and Plus-X.
With one strong light, I could create hot backlight for a sunlight effect, I could bounce it off of a white wall /ceiling / bedsheets, or I could create a hard key light. I augmented that one light with paper lanterns for soft light, and some photoflood bulbs in reflector dish housings.
So my suggestion would be to find a strong LED hard light (ideally with a fresnel attachment), bi-color, and start playing with it direct or softened (bounced or diffused). And then also create one LED softlight, something that needs less grip work to soften. You’ll learn a lot with one hard light and one soft light. Bi-color will help you deal with daylight and tungsten situations and play with warm and cool light. You can also still use paper lanterns even with LED bulbs.
One issue to consider regarding being closer with the camera physically on a wider lens versus further back on a longer lens is how any foreground elements (if any) come into play.
Not every close-up has to be “clean” — for example, if the point of the shot is to make the actor look surrounded by a crowd on all sides, then sometimes it is better to use a long enough lens to fit a row of foreground extras in front of the actor, seeing the actor through a gap to maintain the feeling of being trapped on all sides.
If your goal is shoot an actor from the chest-up, let’s say, then on one focal length you might be three feet from the actor but on another focal length you might be five feet from the actor. There might be practical reasons why one distance would be better than another, like if you want things passing in front of the actor’s face.
Bottom line is do your homework. Plan carefully. Shot list or storyboard. Then be open to any new ideas on the set if they are correct for the movie and you can quickly plan your coverage and editing around the new approach. Don’t rely on being an improvisational genius on the shooting day, winging it with no advanced planning.
Kubrick had very, very long shooting schedules planned and then he usually went over schedule. He spent five days shooting the final push in on the photograph for “The Shining”… and then a week later spent a few more days reshooting it! He also did extensive lighting tests of every set during production — on “Full Metal Jacket” he spent a week lighting and testing the bathroom for the night scene when R. Lee Ermey is killed. Most of us don’t have that luxury. Being well-organized with pre-planning doesn’t exclude the possibility of coming up with new ideas on set.
Yes, filling a frame evenly with light achieve it’s maximum potential softness for that size.
However, keep in mind that maximum softness doesn’t have to be the goal, sometimes you need less softening or you want some texture in the soft light by having some specular light mixed in. I’ve put a frame of 1/4 Grid in front of a hard light sometimes, which definitely gives you a hot spot in the center and not much softening, but that was intentional — the wide master had a hard sunset effect coming into the room and I wanted to just slightly soften the light on close-ups without changing the look dramatically. Some DPs will shine light through a porous material or bounce off of a pebbly surface to give the soft light some texture from faint specular hard light being mixed in.
Theoretically, if you evenly fill a 12’x12′ surface, let’s say, with light, corner to corner, the softness is the same whether or not it is a bounce surface or light passing through diffusion — the 12’x12′ surface is the “source” creating the soft effect, not the lights behind or in front of it. Practically, however, there are reasons why one technique might create a softer effect than another because it is easier to fill the frame evenly from edge to edge with minimal hot spots.
It is a bit easier to put flags in front of a diffusion frame rather than a bounce because of the lights in front of the frame that the flags have to work around, plus you don’t want the flags to actually cut into the beams of light hitting the bounce.
Roger has stated in the past his issue with grids as opposed to flags for cutting light, that they can make the soft light seem sharper. I use grids now and then but you can see the issue with them if you stand where the subject will be and move around a bit. If there is a grid as soon as you move side to side, you see less of the total soft light surface especially around the edges — meaning it starts to get less soft. It depends on how close the grid is to you and how deep it is, etc. This is one reason I don’t use a grid on a directly overhead soft box (I use a skirt instead) because actors often are not dead-center under the box and you want them lit when the box is a bit ahead or behind them too.
Roger has mentioned in the past that sometimes he puts a row of vertical flags in front of a soft light as sort of a louver to control their spill.
Normally I’d agree that there should just be one aspect ratio for a movie — I don’t recommend, for example, showing an old 1.37 Academy movie in any other aspect ratio.
This is a bit different for a couple of reasons — first is that IMAX traditionally (I’m talking about the original 15-perf 65mm format projected in special theaters) was always designed to be composed with an excess 1/3 space at the top, extra headroom, because the theater is designed for your eye to go to the middle of the very large and tall 1.43 screen. To some degree, the area at the top of the screen is like the sky above your head, extending to the edges of your vision unless you sit way back in the theater. Not that Nolan seems to compose his IMAX photography with that much headroom but on the other hand he composes with enough headroom that the blu-ray versions of “Oppenheimer”, “Dunkirk”, etc. show the IMAX scenes in full 1.78 : 1 HD cropped from 1.43 and the headroom looks fine.
Second, the Digital IMAX screens are 1.90 : 1, not 1.43 : 1 and more people are going to see that version rather than the 15P 70mm prints.
Third, Nolan likes to release also in 5-perf 70mm 2.20 : 1 and 4-perf 35mm 2.39 : 1 prints.
Clearly he is fine with shifting aspect ratios in the past although this movie was only shot in IMAX, not a mix, so he could have simplified things a bit and picked 1.85 for his non-1.43 IMAX showings as a second aspect ratio rather than 1.43, 1.90, 2.20, and 2.39 in this case. 1.85 is very close to 1.78 which is what the HD blu-ray versions would be anyway. The 5-perf 70mm could have been side-masked to 1.85. But I think he’s being a bit of a showman wanting to make each version special in the theaters and he seems fine with the reframing.
I would add that you can tell it is a very large soft light close to her because the shadows are almost horizontal so it is eye level and yet she is looking down and you can still see the light reflected in her eyes — which suggests a soft light that is almost her height.
A Rec.709/P3 display LUT on set works most of the time if you want straightforward, standard image contrast and saturation. Sure, you may prefer a personal LUT with a tweak towards slightly deeper blacks, etc. If you have a DIT on set, they can do adjustments like that using ASC CDL values on top of the basic LUT.
The problem becomes when you want a more stylized final look in terms of contrast, like the look of a higher-level ENR or skip-bleach print let’s say. Then it would be helpful to have a LUT with that look so your lighting is taking it into account (or a DIT that can adjust the LUT on set). That’s when it becomes more important to create a LUT in prep based on tests. Otherwise, if you can’t create that LUT, you may have to rely more on your light meter as a guide… but it does beg the question if that display image on set is inaccurate, what is your plan for dailies, which usually use the same LUT as on set? Or is this a one-off sort of thing like a 2-day commercial or short film where you color-correct the dailies after the shoot is over?
Ideally you are making the decision based on story reasons — does the background add any important narrative detail or set the appropriate mood for the performance to play against, or is it distracting to the story and performance (keep in mind that a hot window can also be distracting sometimes.) And if (a big “if”) realism is important for the story, does the balance between the interior and exterior feel believable, natural?
But the truth is that often you are also taking into account logistical issues. Will the real background keep changing throughout the day as you film coverage, creating matching issues? Is the background correct for the period of the story (maybe there is some anachronistic element that needs to be de-emphasized)? Is the background correct at all (maybe the location is a cheat for another location)? Can the background be shot at the correct time of day for the story or will you be filming past sunset into dusk for a day scene? How much control do you actually have over that background (maybe you’re in a skyscraper on the 50th floor and the windows are too large to gel)?
And then there are similar practical considerations. Will the background always stay in the background or will the actor move to the window and be followed by the camera, making the background more prominent?
Break it down…
Fall-off rate: get the light as close to the subject as possible because the fall-off rate becomes less steep the further away a light it (inverse square law).
Warmth: use a light that has a color temperature lower than what the camera is set for.
Softness: the larger the source relative to the subject, the softer the shadows. A bounce surface or a diffusion frame is the source in this case, not the light hitting it.
Besides those three things, you have angle of the light (in this case, from the side and slightly low) and the contrast (in this case, no fill and maybe negative fill as well, combined with the fast fall-off, combined with your camera’s gamma settings and black level for display/conversion from log/raw.)
It’s a cult film now, I’ve had many young people on set, in production offices, at trade shows, etc. come up to me and express their love of this film.
Unfortunately you’ve run into the major issue with tenting a location for filming night scenes during the day — when you need to put your lamps far away and high enough to get a good moonlight effect. Obviously the first solution — besides going back to shooting those shots at night with no tent — is to build the tent as large as possible!
Another possibility is to shoot day for night, perhaps even just blacking out the view through the windows with a wall of black but shooting light from over the top of the wall. You’d have to avoid the real sun coming through if you wanted more control, or use the sun as the moon. But inside you’d have a hard time balancing with dim sources like flashlights and candles… (and heavy ND gel on windows creates its own issues/problems.)
You could see if a mirror mounted at the top of the tent, if it is tall enough, could be used to bounce a source on the ground to get a better beam. You could also try using Lekos as your moonlight since they need less space to create a beam.
Experience sort of teaches you how, let’s say, a chest-up close-up is going to feel on a big screen as opposed to a neck-up close-up… but also most movies even today shoot tests in prep and watch the tests on a theater-sized screen in a D.I. suite so they can judge the results accurately, so there is some feedback from the start about screen sizes.
But the truth is that each movie sets up its own language in regard to shot size that the audience quickly gets used to. Occasionally when you shoot super-tight close-ups and see them later on the big screen, you sometimes feel that perhaps it’s too tight, too much detail, seeing every nose hair and pore… but hopefully you felt that way when filming the shot on set and had time to back off if necessary.
