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A 1000W LED set to full warm (below 3200K) for sunset might be enough, it really depends on how dark it is outside and how far away you need to put the light out the window. If you can darken the view beyond with, let’s say, a Double Net scrim on a frame, that might help the balance. Or wait until dusk or for heavier overcast weather. If it is a bright overcast day then the 1000W LED might not overpower the natural daylight enough. It’s hard to say, it’s a bit like asking if a 5K tungsten fresnel outside a window is bright enough for a sunset effect — half the time, it is.
I just by coincidence was looking at this shot in “Barry Lyndon”, which used I think a 10K tungsten fresnel outside the window for a sunset effect (the light is barely visible for a few frames as the camera pans 180 degrees.)
That BTS clip you put up doesn’t show a poor-man’s process, it shows a bluescreen process shot. Poor-man’s process is when you fake driving with no vfx, just a black background at night, or outside with wind machines blowing dust so you can’t tell the car is static, etc. And there is LED work in “Disclaimer”, like the backyard view from her kitchen.
Personally I’d rather use LED screens rather than bluescreens for driving work and get everything “in-camera”.
A lot of that depends on the art department plans for the stage space, it’s often restricted. If they aren’t giving you enough space for the backing and lights, you can see about pushing the set back but often there’s a reason they’ve squeezed you, like another set is in the way, the fire lanes, etc. But I would hope that I’d have at least fifteen feet back for the backing and pipe for the 12Ks. Twenty feet would be even better but the further you push everything back, the higher the lights have to go, the larger the backing has to be, etc. You often run into the limitation of the height of the stage ceiling and greenbeds.
I think the question is too abstract — I mean, I’d place the hard light a city block away to get a sharp pattern like sunlight from it, with the correct fall-off, but that’s hardly practical and the intensity would be useless.
You basically will try and get the hard light as far back as is practical or possible while still maintaining the intensity you want. You also have to factor in whether you are using multiple hard lights for a row of windows and if you need to separate the beams.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with a hard top light in this case, especially since it is not hitting the face. I think if you want the eye to go to the person, the top light has to be hotter on them than the ground to frame left. I tried to play with it below.
In terms of the face, if your bounce card was further upstage so the face was more 1/4 lit by it, not as frontal, I think that would give you some light in the eyes but still keep some darkness.
There may be a very slight advantage with a lower contrast lens in terms of preserving shadow detail in a high contrast situation, but on the other hand, it’s also harder to fix an image from a low-contrast lens with a lot of flaring in a situation where there is too much lens flare and contrast loss – plus there may be resolution loss too in that situation that is harder to fix.
So I tend to agree that a lens with a softer contrast isn’t absolutely necessary if you want to get that look in digital. On the other hand, if the lens gives you the look you want “out of the box” without any adjustments to the LUT, etc. then some cinematographers will prefer that. To me, contrast is a bit down the list of priorities since it can be adjusted in color-correction, as opposed to sharpness, the flare characteristics or the shape of the bokeh – though it all may be tied together. If one wants a softer image from an older lens, it may be that the contrast loss is just something that is part of the equation that the cinematographer accepts as a way of avoiding diffusion filters.
And the problem with post-diffusion is that if the soft look isn’t baked into the original, or at least baked into dailies, it leaves the door open for the studio to change their minds against the will of the director and cinematographer.
Opal, Half Soft Frost and Quarter Grid Cloth are all pretty similar in softening and light loss but produce slightly different shadow textures since when you start getting into very light diffusion, particularly light silks, the way that hard light leaks through and blends with the soft light, the way the light is spread is different. You just have to test, there isn’t a right or wrong choice. Opal, for example, is nice in a 4’x4′ or smaller but can’t really be used on a larger scale and rattles in a breeze. Quarter Silk is interesting because some sharp light comes through so you can still get some feeling of specular highlights and retain some texture on the skin, which may or may not be a good thing.
Most films mastered in the 2000s at 2K are not going to get re-scanned and re-color-corrected for 4K, they are going to up-sample the 2K master to 4K (as what happened for the 4K “Lord of the Rings” remastering, I think only a few shots were redone at 4K from scans of the negative). On a UHD disc, though, you could see some difference if it is an HDR version since the old masters still have a log version to work from. In particular, movies with extensive 2K visual effects work or time-consuming image manipulation are unlikely to have the budget to redo everything at 4K (even Peter Jackson couldn’t do that.) However, movies that had a more normal color-correction process using a 2K D.I. might be redone in 4K if the studio feels that they are preserving it for archival reasons and the title was profitable enough to be worth the investment.
I think in particular it would be a challenge to re-do “O Brother Where Art Thou?” again at 4K from new scans of the original negative because of the extensive color-correcting involved. However, I could be wrong — David Fincher has been talking about a new 4K remastering of “Seven” from the original negative, but that isn’t a movie that had a lot of post manipulation or VFX other than the original prints using a silver retention process.
As a point of reference, a lot of money was spent remastering all seven years of the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” TV series to HD even though the live-action was shot on 35mm film, because it was a VFX-heavy show that originally saved time and money by doing the work in NTSC video. So all the VFX had to be redone in HD. In the end, it seems that the studio has not recouped its investment yet, so a similar remastering to HD for “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and “Star Trek: Voyager” have been put on hold. Which is ironic considering all these shows were shot in 35mm partially to “future-proof” them for HD! So it’s the same problem for VFX-heavy features mastered in 2K – the non-VFX shots in 35mm could be rescanned and remastered in 4K but few can afford to redo all the VFX work at 4K. So in some cases, it’s simpler to just upscale the 2K master to 4K. Most of the color-correction work at this point would be spent in making a HDR version if they have a master in log gamma to work from.
I don’t think softening a light has to always be motivated. If you light a set with a low orange hard light raking across the room to simulate a setting sun… but for a face in the foreground, place a frame of Opal just off-camera to soften it slightly, I don’t think most audiences are going to notice that the light is harder in the background than it is on the face, it is still directional. But even in real life, the sun can pass through things that alter the hardness, maybe one window is a bit blocked by a leafy tree or that window is dustier while in the background, the window is open and clear, etc. Natural light in a room has textures and variations to it.
One of the most common cheats is to use soft light in a candlelit situation — candle flames are fairly sharp point sources. Multiple candles in a candelabra will soften the effect a bit, the light bouncing off of the ceiling will lower the contrast and add more softness, so we justify using soft light for candle scenes but often the lighting is much softer than real candlelight would produce. Same goes for moonlight, which in real life is a hard source, and on a heavily overcast night, hardly exposes anything in actuality, and yet many movies use big soft boxes for moonlight.
In this angle you can see the Source-4 Leko follow spot with the 1/2 CTB on it and a dimmed PARCAN on the right side.
The Gaslight set was lit with black tungsten fixtures in the ceiling — 1K fresnels and 1K PARCANs with medium globes, often at 50% on the dimmer board. Sometimes I had to add a full scrim to knock them down further.
There was one tungsten Source-4 Leko with a 36 degree lens (I think) hung from the ceiling with an electrician in costume on a wooden ladder to operate it as a follow-spot. It had 1/2 CTB (blue) gel on it which is the bright light you are seeing in that still (on the right of it, you can see a PARCAN). Prop department made a simple cover for the Leko so it didn’t look so modern.
At that distance, the only way to come close to focusing just a slash of light on the glasses would be to use a Source 4 Leko with something narrow like a 19 degree lens, then use the leaves to create a slash.
Though painting a face isn’t politically correct, so to speak, that’s how Gregg Toland solved the problem in “Ball of Fire” of only seeing Barbara Stanwyck’s eyes in a dark room where her face wasn’t supposed to be visible to the other character played by Gary Cooper. So Toland asked the make-up department to paint Stanwyck’s face black in the morning when she arrived — she phoned the set back and said “what in the hell sort of movie are we making?!?” But it worked!
There’s no way to answer this question in the abstract. Obviously if you had a ring of lightbulbs with enough space between them to put a paper lantern around them, you’d create a larger and thus softer source.
The rule regarding the size of a light source relative to the subject affecting softness still applies. In theory, a paper lantern is a bigger source than a bare light bulb unless the paper lantern is far enough away to be the same physical size relative to the subject as the bare light bulb. If you had a ring of paper lanterns the same distance away as a ring of bare light bulbs, thus larger in size as a source, the light would be softer, at least in one direction (if the bare bulbs were very close together then they would be soft in the direction of the ring but less soft at a right angle to the ring — it’s like comparing a bare 4′ fluorescent tube to a 4′ x 2′ LED soft light, the softness is the same in the long direction but not in the short direction.)
But the reasons you might build a ring light is partly (or mainly) related to size and weight, you are trying to create something with a low profile that can fit close to the ceiling and perhaps augment and spread the light from a practical lamp hanging from the ceiling. In this case, a ring of paper lanterns might hang down too low from the ceiling to be out of the shot. So the scenarios in which you’d use one approach versus the other are different.
When faking sunlight, the goal is generally to be convincing… the trouble is that typically in a real day exterior with sunshine, you wouldn’t be shooting at f/2.0, let’s say, you’re more likely to be stopped down to f/4.0 or deeper. So super shallow-focus is sort of a giveaway that the daylight scene is artificially lit.
When Sven Nykvist filmed “Cannery Row” (1982), which had indoor sets that were supposed to be outdoors in daylight, he knew this would be a problem so he tried to shoot his real day exteriors at a wide aperture and his interior day “exteriors” at a stop deeper than wide-open so they had a similar feeling.
Shining a flashlight at him will just create a bright spot in the eyeglasses and add fill light. Yes, diffusing a pair of mirror sunglasses might do the trick but it would be better to light the opposite direction of where the person is looking as brightly as possible, though it would have to be a large flat wall or building, something that had a chance of filling the reflection of the glasses. Then the face could be kept dark.
But if the reverse view does not lend itself to creating a bright reflection, then try dull-spraying a pair of mirrored sunglasses and hit them with some frontal light, just beware that you’re hitting the face with light.
