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I think there is some confusion between fall-off and the size of a light source. They are not connected. The fall-off of light from a source follows the inverse square law. How soft that light is on the subject is governed by the size of the source relative to that subject. That is simple geometry.
I suspect that the bounce was warming the HMI a little, so I doubt I used any CTO gel. Had there been a warm practical in the kitchen I might have warmed the lamp and shot without an 85 or EF filter on the camera.
I have only done some limited day for night shooting and that was in a forest in Kenya. I did use some artificial lighting to pull the character away from the background but I wouldn’t say it necessary I think that depends on whether it is sunny or cloudy or if the foliage is particularly dense.
There was a bounce source in front of the car to add a little more contrast to the natural light. Yes, the scene changes from rain to snow and this was achieved by our effects team, in camera, using cranes, rain bars and ‘snow’ blowers. We wanted some flexibility in scheduling these shooting days because we needed, at the very least, cloud cover. The problem was the road closure, which allowed us only two specific weekends to work over. We got lucky in that it rained on our first day and remained cloudy through the next morning.
I remember the room was small and I didn’t use anything inside. There was a small window to the right so I probably had a 6K HMI and bounce source outside.
You could just use white card. You could cut out a circle of any size, preferable cheating it larger than the moon’s reflection really would be.
Some post stabilization was used on the last film I shot but I don’t remember any being needed on ‘1917’. It is a good tool and can help a tracking shot that has a bump in it.
I probably used a 32 and 40mm for most of the film but there were plenty of shots made with wider lenses and with a purpose made set.
If you only need the reflection of the moon you might be better off using a white cut out and lighting that. You could then adjust the size of the cut out and even paint on some detail. A lamp directed at the window will surely look like what it is.
Ahh! I’ve corrected that. I should have said more observational. ‘Jarhead’ was definitely more subjective!
Had we gone hand-held I would have been the operator slipping around in the mud so perhaps that was another reason I didn’t favor hand-held! Seriously though, we wanted that solid unrelenting forward movement that the Trinity, the wire rigs and the crane gave us.Placing diffusion on the barn doors of a lamp will not really make the source ‘softer’ unless your subject is very close to it. The diffusion will spread the light in a more even wide beam but it won’t actually soften a shadow. A second layer directly on top of the first might spread the light even more but it will still not soften the light. To do that you need to make your source larger, as would be the case if your second layer of diffusion is set a few meters in front of the first. In general terms, the further your diffusion from the lamp the softer the light.
In early conversations we considered shooting entirely with a hand-held camera as we had done on the earlier film, ‘Jarhead’. But as we developed our storyboards we could see that there were many occasions the camera wanted to be more solid and more observational. To shoot some scenes hand-held may well have worked but what would those scenes be and why those in particular? We were shooting on a reasonably long lens so any hand-held work would have been very ‘active’, which we felt would break the spell of the single shot.
I shall be interested in watching the recent ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ to see their approach.
