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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.
Kurosawa shot deep focus with longer anamorphic lenses in the 1960s — it’s just a matter of stopping down the lens. The depth of field with anamorphic is just lower because the focal lengths are longer, but jumping up from Super-35 to FF35 is not a big difference — in terms of anamorphic, if the 35mm sensor area was 18mm tall and the FF35 area was 24mm tall, that’s a 1.33X difference so that is also how much you’d have to stop down to match depth of field once you matched field of view and distance. So getting more depth of field in anamorphic is not insurmountable either by using more light or a higher ISO.
With 35mm film, the advantage of anamorphic over cropping spherical was the larger negative area for less grain, better resolution (though at wide apertures, often spherical lenses are sharper) but that’s less of an issue with digital where the main reason to shoot anamorphic is the anamorphic look (flares, stretched bokeh, some barrel distortion.) If you want a shallow focus or deep focus look, then you can shoot either spherical or anamorphic.
Think of it this way, in the days before digital when film was printed, if we did a lighting contrast ratio test, we printed and projected the results. So we were picking a lighting ratio based on, or factoring in, the contrast of the print stock. The equivalent today would be the viewing display LUT.
