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Sure if you can find a large lavender net, that would be nice but they are somewhat rare and fragile.
It’s usually stretched on a large frame (like a Single Net) and placed about halfway between the window and the backing. You just have to consider any hard sunlight effect lighting because if it passes through the net, it will be washed out like its hitting a dirty window. So if the net is back enough to get the hard sunlight unit in front of it, that might be good. Also consider keeping other light off of the net like the backing light, again, because it will increase the haze effect — so in this case, you probably want the backing light to fall behind the net.
Another option is to neatly cover the windows with 1/8 Hampshire Frost, which will blur the view (the more blurring when the backing is farther away, so sometimes this trick is better when the backing has to be too close to the window so the blurring from the frost is subtle.)
I’ve also used 1/2 Soft Frost on a large frame to blur a backing — in this case you control the softening by the distance from the backing. Sometimes just having the frame about a foot from the backing is enough to make it softer.
You only need to be consistent shot to shot within a scene — starting a new scene, you can chose a new color balance, etc.
I pick a color temperature setting for the scene and then light around that. In a room of mixed daylight and practical sources of different colors, you just have to pick what setting gets you close to what you want creatively.
You start with what you can’t control easily, like a bunch of daylight coming in, and then work on what you can control. But there is not right or wrong choice. You may decide on something in-between daylight and tungsten so that the daylight is cool and the tungsten is warm, but to which direction you lean (4800K? 4300K?, etc.) is up to you creatively.
In situations that you have more control over, then yes, you pick something and light to that. Maybe in a day interior on location you pick 5500K and use powerful tungsten lamps outside the window for a warm sunset effect.
Again, you start by considering what you can’t adjust or control or turn-off and how you want that to render. Maybe you are using a lot of old Cool White fluorescent tubes, which are around 4800K with some green in them — if you want those to render more of a cyan, then you have to set the camera closer to 3200K — if you use 5500K on the camera, then they tend to look slightly warm-green, a yellow-ish color. I’ve even gelled daylight windows with Full 85 correction so that the Cool White tubes would render cyan compared to the daylight.
Stills from 4K blu-rays can be misleading since if it is an HDR version, you can only simulate how they might look when viewing on an SDR monitor.
DVDBeaver.com reviews of 4K discs always have this warning:
“It is likely that the monitor you are seeing this review is not an HDR-compatible display (High Dynamic Range) or Dolby Vision, where each pixel can be assigned with a wider and notably granular range of color and light. Our capture software if simulating the HDR (in a uniform manner) for standard monitors. This should make it easier for us to review more 4K UHD titles in the future and give you a decent idea of its attributes on your system. So our captures may not support the exact same colors (coolness of skin tones, brighter or darker hues etc.) as the 4K system at your home.”
Strong artificial backlighting dates back to the 1910-20s when carbon arcs started being used on sets. The technical reason was that it provided separation in b&w but the most common aesthetic reason is that it is beautiful. There are other reasons it might be used depending on the context.
It happens — ultimately filmmaking is an expensive business and you were hired to deliver a certain level of work within a budget for time and equipment. That’s the reality.
You fight for the quality of the shot when it matters, when you think a drop in quality will be noticeable and everyone in post will be trying to make the problematic shot work and forgetting soon why it was not shot as well as it should have been.
It’s frustrating and depressing when you no choice but to roll cameras on something below your standards but you try and move on because there will be other battles coming up that need your concentration. A producer once said to me (regarding a perfectionist director we were dealing with): “If you make everything equally important then nothing is important”. The other common phrase is “Perfect is the enemy of good.” You have to realize that if you take another ten minutes to make a shot better, you may be robbing yourself of ten minutes later in the day on something even more important.
Ultimately there is always a time element to lighting, which is why you plan your wide-shot lighting with how you will get into your close-ups. Lighting a tight shot by itself is often easier than lighting a wide shot. But when you get around to lighting the close-up, you are running out of time (plus if the actors have reached a certain momentum in the performance, you don’t want to kill it by taking too much time lighting the coverage) so you have to have a plan from the start for a simple way of adjusting the wider-shot lighting if you want to soften it further but maintain the same f-stop.
As a general rule:
1. You light the wide shots first to establish the look (color, contrast, and angle) of the lighting. This means it’s a judgement call based on your taste and experience as to how far you can later alter the light for the tighter shots.
2. If the tighter shot is along the same axis as the wider one, just a tighter view, you often adjust the wide-shot lighting, not re-light from scratch. For one reason, even if you adjust the lighting of the subject, you don’t want to have to re-light the background… so if both the subject and the background was lit with the same light source, you try and find a way of adjusting the foreground without changing the background.
You generally don’t switch to lighting a wide shot after you’ve lit the close-up — you light the wide shot first, which determines the feeling of the lighting, the direction & softness. Once you go in closer, you can decide how much you can alter what was established in the wide shot.
Skipping the bleach step leaves silver where there is color dye density, so if done to the negative, the highlights get denser (hotter) and if done to a print, the shadows get denser (darker).
So it is not unusual to underexpose by a stop when doing it to the negative to avoid too much overexposure in the highlights. Black level is a digital setting in digital color-correction. The only issue is how much shadow detail you want if you set black to zero.
Some monitors will allow you to darken the area outside the frame lines without resorting to blacking it out. There are reasons why a DP/Operator would want to see outside the theatrical frame lines, like to protect a larger area for either TV or VFX/post work or a taller IMAX version… or to simply see things about to enter the frame before they do.
