Filmmaking Notes

I set aside a few hours to edit the “Behind the...

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:22:06 -0400

I set aside a few hours to edit the “Behind the Scenes” photos of a shoot….but I liked one of the photos so much I started playing in Photoshop, and I accidentally ended up with a poster.

Rampage Storyboards

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 23:19:54 -0400

I shot a short film called “Rampage”. I’ve bogged about some of the lighting before (see some of my earlier posts), but now I’d like to share my storyboards…

If you haven’t seen the movie, perhaps you’d best watch that first:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OggCy4rjwmQ

Whenever there are blank panels, that means that there’s a scene or a setup change. It allows me to keep the storyboards, shotlists and scripts for one scene together.

Occasionally, I’ll put the storyboard out of order if there’s only a shot or two needed for a later scene, like above.

From here, we started giving nicknames to the scenes. This allowed us to clearly reference “the so and so scene”.

Short Films with Chinese Lanterns

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 03:28:43 -0400

Here’s an uber short called “Stew”:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLzlvjRzJcA

A friend asked “How could I easily light a scene with a lot of actors sitting around a table? Oh, and it all needs to be shot in one day”

- @josephdunstan

I answered that a Chinese Lantern in the middle of the table would be a convenient key light for all the characters. It would mean that less lights would need to move between setups.

I went to Bunnings warehouse and purchased the materials to make a Chinese lantern. The build cost about $25 total, and consisted of the following ingredients:

- 2x70watt household bulbs

- Bayonet mounts

- a few meters of 240v power lead

- 2x 240v plugs

- Chinese lantern

I shot the above dialogue scene, called “Stew” to test the application of this light.

From this experiment I discovered:

200w bulbs are no longer made, or are very hard to come by. However, 70w bulbs, which have the equivalent output of 100watts, are available at all supermarkets. By creating two bulb fixtures, and dangling them both in one Lantern I got the necessary light output.

The incident light produced at the actor’s position (approx 1.5meters from the lantern’s perimeter) was f3.2 at ISO 640.

This allowed me to shoot at f4 or f4 and a half, which gave the actor’s a little room to move and also rendered the Actor’s PALE PALE PALE skin a little more accurately).

When Joseph came to shoot his film, he was using a Sony Z7, which is rated at about ISO320. This is half as sensitive as my ISO640, and as such, he opened up to f2.8, resulting in the same exposure.

In order to get a little contrast between the Broad and Short sides of the face (the near and far side respectively) I cheated the Lantern’s position slightly. In the wide shots, the lantern is positioned directly between the two boys, and in front of their noses.

The Lantern actually needed to be in shot, so I removed it in Post. Here’s what the raw footage of the wide shot actually looks like:

If I shot the CUs with this same positioning the lighting on the faces of the boys would be very flat. So, in the CUs the position of the Lantern was cheated a little further away, towards the actor’s far cheek. This results in the drop off on the short side.

However, for Joseph’s shoot this above technique proved difficult due to the size/shape of the room. Thus, we needed to leave the Chinese lantern in the middle of the table. In order to give the actor’s a bit of contrast in their face we augmented the light hitting the Actor’s Far side with a Dedo. The Dedo had diff gel, and was dimmed down to such a weak intensity that it was only adding 1/3 – ½ of a stop of light.

Here’s a photo I stole on set of Joseph’s lead actor, which demonstrates the desired falloff on the broad side of the face….

Finally, here’s us using the Chinese Lantern, whilst filming Jo’s short film “Death at the Dining Table”:

Men in diapers, girls in underwear

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:21:38 -0400

Men in diapers, girls in underwear:

Nat, who played a part (small but integral) in a music video made for the Melbourne International Comedy fest blogged about her experience with me and the Bad Boys of Music Theatre.

Here’s a Timelapse Video demonstrating my second attempt...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 03:31:00 -0400

Here’s a Timelapse Video demonstrating my second attempt at lighting a white backdrop.

This technique uses 6 redheads, 2 C stands, 2 reflectors, and an available off-white wall.

Lighting with Too much Available Light

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:27:37 -0500

The problem:

We were shooting in an office that structurally was great, and had great colors for the walls, but there was way too much Available light.

The office was surrounded by windows 15 feet off the ground, and flouros from the ceiling that wouldn’t turn off. At our location scout we’d overestimated how much of it we could block out.

Thus, on the day of shooting I:

1. Setup a low ISO (from memory 160)

2. Start to setup my overly complex three point lighting design

I fiddled, and tweaked trying to get the right balance of enough fill light, whilst still suggesting a “Dark” side to the film. But eventually I decided it was all too much. Thus I…

3. Turned off all the lights

4. Upped my ISO to a spot where the ambient light was underexposing the image by approximately 1 stop

5. Used a Dedo as an eyelight.

PRESTO! That’s kindof the look I want! There’s some blacks in the image, his eye pops, you can feel a KEYLIGHT coming from Screen Right (if you look at the nose shadow).

….however, it’s still missing something.

There’s no motivation for the light sources. We can feel the light coming from the right side of the shot, but we can’t see any suggestions of where it is.

That’s when I drew inspiration from something I saw one day in a hotel room….

If you ignore the beams of hard light, this is actually quite a dull image. Remove those hotspots and this photo would be underexposed.

So, with a bit of cardboard and a stanley knife, I rigged up a cutter, and thus, we have the shot as it appears in the film…

Now, we have a motivation for the Keylight (or the eyelight). As an added bonus the image has a bit more contrast to it, and bit more tonal variation in an otherwise boring flat color.

Sometimes "Doing it in Post" is better (but not often)

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:53:12 -0500

The sayings:

“A good cameraman never says We can fix it in post”

“Don’t say we can fix it in post unless YOU will do it”

are sayings I stick to quite a bit. Sometimes that means creating the color-tint in camera, or sometimes it means a little bit more work on set.

However, whilst filming my most recent short film I stuck to that rule too closely.

THE OPENING SHOT:

We had a cool idea for the opening shot of our short film “RAMPAGE” - to shoot through a magnifying lamp up into our lead actor’s eye, distorting it and implying he has a warped perspective on the world. He would then push the lamp out of the way, and it would rest on the word “RAMPAGE”, similarly distorting some of the letters.

Here is the storyboard for that opening sequence….

To get the shot we placed the tripod low to the ground, put the actor on a chair, and placed the magnifying lamp between the two.

I shot virtually the entire short film at f4, however, for this shot we needed a different approach. When the magnifying lamp was turned on, in order to get any sort of usable image I closed down to f22 at ISO 160. I wanted to virtually see the lightbulb in it’s entirety and at these settings, I almost got the look I wanted.

Next, I wanted to see the actor’s hand as he grabbed onto the stand of the magnifying lamp. A dedo just out of frame dimmed to half power rendered the correct image.

THE HARD PART:

Here’s where we started to struggle. I used a DEDO aimed into the actor’s eye, but it was nowhere near enough light! He said it was okay to pump some more into his eye - because he’s an absolute champion! Thus, I grabbed another Dedo and also pumped that into his eye.

Here is where we should have done it in post-production! As you can see from the storyboard the plan was to have him push the lamp out of frame. However, that never made it into the final cut! I realize now looking back that we should have done away with the movement of the magnifying lamp and taken two separate exposures:

1. Expose for the Magnifying Lamp Bulb at ISO 160 and f22

and

2. Expose for his Eye at ISO 160 and f4.

In post-production we could have combined the two images simply by creating a mask from the inside of the magnifying lamp!

This would have put less strain on the actor, and would have pushed the camera less.

Here is the shot as it appears in the film:

Here is the setup….

As you can see, poor Mark is resting his eyes for a moment. Absolute Trooper.

From now on, when there’s a natural mask within the shot, or when the actor’s are starting to burn up under the heat, I’m going to look for a way to do multiple exposures and comp them in post.

Sometimes, it seems, it is better to do it in post.

Wrapping Key Light

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:44:04 -0500

Over the Summer 2011 holidays I shot a Tropfest short Film - RAMPAGE. Unfortunately, it didn’t make it in :( We’re now attempting to enter it into other festivals, and hopefully it has a nice festival run! We’re holding off uploading it to the interwebs for the moment, in case it voids us from festivals!

This was the first project I DoP-ed (without doing any other jobs at the same time). Here is the second scene of the Short film…

This scene: looks like a guy having breakfast casually, but on closer inspection the room is really sparse, and bare. Sterile and creepy.

The tricky element: It’s supposed to look like a warm morning sun, but the film is still a ‘dark’ film.

Here was the lighting design for the shot…

We had already shot half the film in an office, and because there was too much ambient light coming through all the windows I resorted to only using Dedos as Eyelights. Thus when we came to this shot, I continued the use of the Dedos.

The Motivated Light Source:

I placed the Window & Venetians in frame so we can show the warm morning sunlight from outside. We were shooting at night so I placed a Redhead outside, shone through a reflector so that it hits the Venetians evenly. The diffusion is an important element that I missed once in the past (see my post on “Hollywood Keylight”). This sets up the principal illumination level of the room and the motivation for the Keylight.

The Key Light:

Because the window is setup as the motivation for the light as Screen right of the actor, we can fake the Key light coming from screen right . So I set up a Dedo, and pumped it into the actor’s eyes.

The Wrapped Keylight:

Here was the tricky element - I needed some form of fill light, to hide the “sourcyness” of the keylight. However, when I used a fill light (such as a redhead or dedo bounced from Screenleft) there was no longer enough contrast to the image. The solution was to WRAP a second Dedo. By placing a second Dedo close to the KeyLight and bouncing it off the ceiling (to make it even softer) it made the KeyLight wrap around the actor’s face, giving a tad of illumination to the fill side, but still allowing his ScreenLeft ear to fall into blackness.

Tweaks:

The floor featured heavily in the shot, and I wanted it to be a stop or two darker than the actor, so I needed to use some cutters. I ended up hanging some materials from some tripods.

This is what the set looked like:

Dual Camera Shoot

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:36:10 -0500

Here is an image from an office scene, shot for Fergus in Hell (www.fergusinhell.com)….

The DoP was sick this day, so whilst the first unit shot a scene in the kitchen, I set up this simple setup.

Now, I’m the first to admit that this is not going to win any awards for Cinematography - this is a very flatly lit scene, with nothing fancy about it. However, that’s what I want to breakdown here: how simple this design really is.

Here is the lighting design:

As you can see, it was created with 2x Redheads and a Reflector.

The KeyLight:

Unlike all of my other examples in this blog, thus far, The key light is not being shone through a reflector. This time it’s bouncing off the reflector :)

There is a window in that spot between John and Andrew, however, we closed the blinds, and rested the Reflector against it. By pumping it into the reflector it recreates the window - but means that it’s at a fixed intensity. If we just opened the window we’d be battling clouds, and the time of day.

The shadow from the lighting stand disappears because the bounced light is incredibly soft.

The Fill Light:

The fill light has to be softened even more than the incredibly soft Key Light. To achieve this, the lamp was aimed at the ceiling at a 45 degree angle. By moving it closer or further from the performers, the contrast for the scene changes. For the purposes of this project, this amount of contrast was appropriate - it’s supposed to look like a flat boring office.

So why, when lighting, would we aspire to have a flat looking simple scene? Because it afforded us the luxury of shooting with two Cameras…

*Ignore the Redhead on the left there. I was tempted to try to use it as a backlight, but then threw out the idea.

This allowed us to knock out the couple of pages of dialogue incredibly quickly. And By only using two lights, the rest of the crew were able to start pre-rigging the lights for the next setup.

External Night Time

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 04:33:00 -0500

Here is another image from “A Burger Too Far” (see the last blog post for the details of the project)….

This was a twoshot master for the whole scene. The two boys exited the restaurant (through the door in the middle of the frame there) and arced around to end in this 2Shot.

This still demonstrates what I want to chat about - we matched the location lights so that the actors could move at night, and the lighting on them wouldn’t be obvious.

This was the lighting design for the shot….

The integral element of the shot was that it’s the master twoshot.

(sidenote: In the final cut, the film actually cuts into a CU of one of the boys then back out to the twoshot, but that was never really intended. That CU was just shot as a “Get out of jail free” shot, in case the master sucked for a line or two)

So, the boys moving in the shot meant we didn’t want them coming into or out of the lights in any noticeable way. If they were completely underexposed at the doorway then all of a sudden they were really well lit on their final mark, the audience would be aware of the lighting.

Conversely though, it’s an amateur mistake to light them evenly across their path, because in reality when you move, the lighting on you changes. Our solution: The intensity on the boys didn’t change, but the modeling did.

I measured the ambient light. Because the business lights were left on, there was actually quite a bit falling on the footpath - juts out of shot there were a series of floodlights, lighting the business in a “Come here and try our food!” way. As such, there was f2 landing on boys at the midpoint between the door and their final position. This would be adequate to render a nighttime look at f2.8. However, the light on them was a very top down, soft light.

I marked out their end position, where there wasn’t as much light falling on the boys, and lit them to match the intensity of the practical lights.

Thus, when they reach their final mark, the light doesn’t change intensity, but just models them.

Studio Bar Look

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 03:31:00 -0500

Here’s a still from “A Burger Too Far”, a short film shot for Deakin Uni student’s final year projects….

The short film was about Rohan (above) having a jerk friend, who is a “sour winner” - ie. he wins at every game of everything ever, and rubs it in Rohan’s face. Then one day Rohan finds something that his mate can’t do: a challenge to eat a 1 kg burger and 1kg of chips in 1 hour.

This was originally designed to be a timelapse shot, where the other character ran around in the background winning every game of pool/darts that he played, and generally being a Jerk about it (However, in the edit it was changed to a split screen shot that achieved the same idea).

It was an important shot in setting up the other dude’s character, whilst simultaneously being slightly romanticized - i mean, who stands still for that long?

Everyone else went to lunch, so that meant I had 45 minutes to potter-around with the lighting. This was the design I came up with:

As you can see, we were battling the practical Flouros that hung over the Pool tables (of mixed color temperatures) and the very-yellow practical lights on the back walls.

The Backlight:

Thank god there’s the practical floating in the background there! If that wasn’t on the wall there’s no way I could’ve justified the light landing on Rohan’s shoulders. That is way too unnatural, and separates him from the background so much that it almost looks green-screened.

However, all that said, it is a “romanticized” shot - since this shot would never happen in real life, we can take liberties.

There was nothing to clamp the light to from above, so to get the light from that spot we used a C-Stand with an arm. The light is about 8 ft off the ground, and the stand is all the way out the right of the shot.

The Fill Light:

Slightly unconventionally in this shot we used a Dedo for the Fill Light. It was aimed only as a spot on his face.

Background light:

We were running out of equipment when it came to illuminating the background - we had no more lighting stands! So someone came up with a genius rig: a pool cue, lent against a chair, holding the redhead.

The light was aimed screen left, and into the corner, bouncing down onto the extras.

In Future:

I was brought on the night before to be the Gaffer. I had a lot of free reign with the lighting - there were scarce lighting designs on set. As we came to each shot we needed to spend a minute deciding on the style.

Kindof by accident we ended up with what I’d describe as a studio look. This doesn’t look like any bar I’ve ever been in - you always seem to be squinting in bars to see the person opposite you. Instead, this feels like the bar in “How I Met your Mother”. Very glossy, and very lit.

In fact, if you look at Rohan’s screen-left cheek in this shot, he’s ever-so-slightly over exposed. The skin tone on screen-right is probably closer to his real-life skin tone. This shot would almost work if we closed down by a stop. To prove the concept, here are some photoshop manipulations…

This is the same shot with just over a stop removed from the whole image. This looks more like a bar to me. A glossy bar, but still a bar. Now let’s expose our hero properly….

This is merely to prove the concept, that we could’ve lost a few stops from the background, and we would’ve acheived a much more realistic “Bar look”.

This probably should’ve been achieved in camera, by closing down the aperture, rather than weakening the lights, because we had barely any control over the practicals.

My next blog post will be another setup from this same project. A similarly glossy external night look.

Glossy Hollywood Keylight

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:27:53 -0500

I’m interested in the “Glossy Hollywood Keylight” style of cinematography, where no matter what, the Hero is illuminated from a source from their side. It’s a convention that audiences have become accustomed to, even though in reality Lights are rarely at eye-level.

Here is a raw still from my project “Critic”, made for the “At the Movies” trailer competition, that demonstrates this style of lighting…

For this effect, this was the lighting design:

As you can see, there are 3x redheads, 1x Practical Flouro and 2x Cheap LED lights used in this setup.

Look at the girl’s hair on the ScreenLeft side - the blue streak is coming from the LED lights, gaffered to a Tripod. They were very weak, so they had to be just out of shot. They are daylight balanced, and so didn’t need any color correction, as they were matching the light coming through the window. However, I did cut 2 small pieces of Baking Paper out, so as to diffuse the light - i didn’t want to sacrifice my precious Diff Gel :)

Here is the ColorGraded shot:

When i got to this stage, I realised the Practical Flouro illuminating the kitchen in the BG was actually too strong. So two black overlays later and we get the finished product….

Note how the background seems more realistic.

Learnt:

The External RedHead coming through the window is clearly a light source. If I was to shoot it again I would put some Diff on the light to make it more subtle.

See the whole Trailer here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/benoitmcc?feature=mhee#p/a/u/0/I88PFCPOhm4

All White Backdrop

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:32:04 -0500

To start this blog post off, let’s open with a corporate Video that I’m currently Working on. It doesn’t get much simpler than this; client wants an All-White-Backdrop Look.

So, this was the RAW FOOTAGE of what we came up with….

The Lighting Design for this setup looked like this….

Key Light:

This is a good first entry in this series on lighting designs, because it demonstrates my favorite use of a reflector: As you can see, the Key light is being shone through the reflector, therefore acting like a scrim.

There are many headed debates online about how this actually affects the quality of light - but I’ll leave that for another post. For the moment I’ll just say that I like the quality of light that this method produces.

When using this method, it seems best to come in at eye level.

Fill:

The redhead is bounced off a poly, angled downwards from about 8 feet up.

I think that even when attempting to get a

The problems encountered:

- This requires a lot of space. We borrowed a studio to do it, and even then the location became hot with the 4x 800w Redheads pumping.

- The wall we used as a backdrop was ever-so-slightly off white. To correct for this i changed the color temperature in camera from 3200 Kelvin to 2900 degrees. I also got the talent to hold a gray card under the lighting circumstances, just in case my idea caused un-natural shift in his skin color, I had the ability to to undo it later.

- I really wanted to blow out the walls to “complete white” “in-camera”, however I didn’t like the glow that this effect produced. I resorted to shooting it as you see it now, and pushing the levels in post slightly. See this image to demonstrate what it will look like with some processing:

As you can see, the masked Triangular bit is the Raw footage, and the bits on the right are the processed bits, where the White is actually white, rather than the slightly off white we shot on.

There is a slight natural Vignette that occurs in the footage. This came from us only using two redheads with Full Diff on the backdrop. Had we used 4, all the corners would be even.

My original intention was to blow out the corners, but then it was suggested that we should add to the natural vignette subtly. That effect would look like this…

Learnt:

- Everybody in front of the camera favours a certain side. As you can see in the images, the talent in this production favours his left (camera right) side of his face. The convention kindof states that the keylight should be on the far side of the lens, therefore, for the next shoot, I shall change the key side to Camera Left so as to have the “minor side” of his face illuminated more.

- We were shooting at f4, and it turned out that the keylight needed to be a little bit stronger than “On Aperture” to make it look natural. When i think about this retrospectively, it makes sense to consider it in terms of IRE. If his skin tone is represented most accurately at 70% IRE, then in this circumstance he looks most normal when photographed as information starts to blow out (ie. at about 80% or 85% IRE)

Other thoughts:

Immediately after shooting I posted this photo from the set to Twitter:

Giving an example of the really complex nature of the setup.

In reply, on twitter @Cailyoung, posted this as a single camera setup with a poly as an alternative method.

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/aadams/story/the_simplest_fastest_interview_lighting_setup—ever/P1/