Crossing Paths: Day Exterior

Michelle Darkin Price and Phil Molloy in Crossing Paths (C) 2015 B Squared Productions
Michelle Darkin Price and Phil Molloy in Crossing Paths (C) 2015 B Squared Productions

The sun is an awesome light source, but you’re not alone as a DP if you sometimes feel it’s the enemy. Shooting Ben Bloore’s Crossing Paths at the weekend, I was very lucky to be met with a perfect blue sky, but even so there was work to do in maintaining and sculpting the light.

The first step on the road to succesfully photographing day exterior scenes is choosing the right location. Crossing Paths is mostly about two characters sitting on a park bench. It needed to look serene and beautiful – which means backlight.

The initial location had an east-facing bench, so I asked for the scene to be scheduled in the evening. That way the characters would be backlit by the sun as it set in the west.

Hard reflector
Hard reflector

The location was later changed to Belper River Gardens (where, three years earlier, I had shot scenes from Stop/Eject). The new bench faced west, which meant shooting in the morning so it would be backlit from the east.

In a rare instance of nature co-operating, the sun blazed out over the trees at about 8am and perfectly backlit the actors as we set up for the master shot. I used an 8’x4′ poly to bounce the light back and fill in their faces.

As we moved into the coverage, a very tall tree started to block some of the sunlight. This was where our hard reflector came in. This is a 3’x3′ silver board mounted in a yoke so that it can easily be panned and tilted.

Col set up this reflector in a patch of sunlight, ricocheting it onto the back of the actors’ heads, maintaining the look of the master shot.

Col adjusts the hard reflector to backlight the talent.
Col adjust the hard reflector to backlight the talent.

Later one of the characters stands up and looks down on the bench. We needed to shoot his CU for this moment without him squinting into the sun, and without harsh shadows on his face. Cue the next tool in our sun control arsenal: the silk. Stretched across a 6’x6′ butterfly frame, the silk acted like a cloud and softened the sunlight passing through it.

Col and production assistant Andrew position the silk.
Col and production assistant Andrew position the silk.
The silk in action on Phil
The silk in action on Phil. (C) 2015 B Squared Productions

You need to think carefully about what order to do your coverage in with natural light, particularly if the day is as sunny as this one was. I asked to leave the shots looking south last, so that the sun would have moved round to backlight this angle.

This south-facing shot was left until around midday in order to have it backlit. (C) 2015 B Squared Productions
This south-facing shot was left until around midday in order to have it backlit. (C) 2015 B Squared Productions

What if it had been an overcast day? Well, it wouldn’t have looked as good, but we were tooled up for that eventuality too. We had an ArriMax M18 which could have backlit the actors in all but the widest shots (for which we would have had to wait for a break in the clouds) and a 4’x4′ floppy for negative fill if the light was too flat. More on those some other time.

Related posts:
Lighting ‘3 Blind Mice’ – using positive and negative fill and artificial backlight for day exterior scenes
Sun Paths – choosing the right locations for The Gong Fu Conection
Moulding Natural Light – shooting towards the sun and modifying sunlight

Crossing Paths is a B Squared production (C) 2015. Find out more at facebook.com/Crossing-Paths-Short-Film-697385557065699/timeline/

Crossing Paths: Day Exterior

Directing Amelia’s Letter

Georgia Winters as Amelia. Photo: Colin Smith
Georgia Winters as Amelia. Photo: Colin Smith

Amelia’s Letter premiered last week at the Cincinnati Film Festival. It’s the first official selection in what we hope will be a long festival run for this moving little ghost story written by Steve Deery and produced by Sophia Ramcharan. Here’s the synopsis:

Amelia receives a letter from her publisher. Over one hundred years later its legacy still haunts writers who visit her Lodge. Gordon discovers the letter and thinks there is a story to be told. It would be better for him if he didn’t try and tell it.

I want to say a bit about my directing process on the film, but beware – this post contains spoilers!

In a preproduction blog entry I talked about writing backstories for the characters, and touched on the films I’d been watching as research. Today I’ll pick up where I left off and carry on through to production.

The backstories, by the way, were really useful to me throughout the process. They provided a filter through which I could view the script, focusing in on what the characters wanted and where they were coming from. And they made it easy to answer many of the questions the actors had about their characters.

The gatehouse of Newstead Abbey, the film's location. Photo: Colin Smith
The gatehouse of Newstead Abbey, the film’s location. Photo: Colin Smith

I decided early on to give the film overtones of gothic horror. This can be seen most clearly in the location and costume design. I watched several horror films, gothic and otherwise, as well as ghost stories, during preproduction. The Awakening (2011, dir. Nick Murphy) and The Woman in Black (2012, dir. James Watkins) proved to me the importance of building a strong emotional spine before bringing in the scares, and the latter film along with The Innocents (1961, dir. Jack Clayton) showed how effective a slow, subtle reveal of a ghost in a corner of the frame can be.

However, as the shoot got closer, I realised I had been too fixated on the genre, and had neglected the very emotional spine I’d admired in the above films. At its core, Amelia’s Letter is about a woman committing suicide. I therefore set out to watch some films that dealt with this topic. First up was Seven Pounds (2008, dir. Gabriele Muccino) – for a Hollywood film starring Will Smith, it’s quite dark and thought-provoking – followed by Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006, dir. Goran Dukic) – an inventive and darkly humourous American indie set in a suicides’ afterlife which is just like the real world, only everything’s a bit more rubbish – and finally Veronika Decides to Die (2009, dir. Emily Young) – in which Sarah Michelle Gellar gives a surprisingly good portrayal of a failed suicide learning to love life again.

I can’t point to any specific tips I gleaned from those films, but they certainly made me think more about the issue. Indeed, during Veronika Decides to Die, I had a breakthrough regarding Amelia. I recalled a Richard Herring podcast I’d listened to in which Stephen Fry, Herring’s interviewee, had talked very openly about his bipolar disorder and a recent suicide attempt he had made. I realised that Amelia should be bipolar. Sufferers are often highly creative people, like Amelia, and sadly have a much higher rate of suicide. Actress Georgia Winters embraced the idea, and although it’s not at all explicit from watching the film that Amelia is bipolar, the highs and lows she goes through while reading the letter are a result of this behind-the-scenes decision.

Tina Harris as Barbara. Photo: Colin Smith
Tina Harris as Barbara. Photo: Colin Smith

Another thing that was a big influence on my interpretation of the script was a tome which a relative bought me one Christmas during my early teens. The Giant Book of Mysteries (edited by Colin, Rowan and Damon Wilson) features a memorable chapter in which several ghost-hunters theorise that spooks are actually something akin to tape recordings. When a tragic event happens, the theory goes, the emotions of the people involved – emitted as electromagnetic waves from the brain – can be  “recorded” by the electrical field of any water nearby, in the same way that sounds can be recorded on the iron oxide of a cassette tape.

I seized this idea as a way of explaining, to the actors if not to the audience, how the supernatural events in Amelia’s Letter function. Once the various authors in the film glimpse Amelia’s ghost and are drawn out of the cottage, it would have been easy to say that these authors are in a trance, but this seemed too easy. Instead I decided that the emotions which Amelia felt when she jumped into the lake were recorded by the water and radiate out from it. The closer they get to the lake, the more their own emotions are taken over by hers until eventually they’re feeling exactly what she did, with the inevitable consequence that they kill themselves too.

Carrying this theory throughout the film, it meant that the glimpses which the authors see of Amelia from the cottage window are simply “recordings” of moments in her life – perhaps a surge of creativity, or depression. By coincidence, the art department had painted fake mould into the corners of the study, which tied in beautifully with the water recording theory and helped explain the supernatural events that occur at the cottage.

Frank Simms as Gordon, with Amelia. Photo: Colin Smith
Frank Simms as Gordon, by the lake with Amelia. Photo: Colin Smith

Although much of the above will not be directly apparent to the viewer, I hope that it gave extra depth and veracity to the performances and so makes the film more effective overall.

Amelia’s Letter is a Stella Vision production in association with Pondweed Productions. Find out more at facebook.com/ameliasletter

Directing Amelia’s Letter

5 Tips for Perfect Shafts of Light

There’s nothing like a good shaft of light to add production value to your cinematography. But you can’t just shine a lamp through a window and expect to get Hollywood shafts. Here are the essential conditions you need:

1. You need focused light, i.e. a lamp with a lens. Source 4s work extremely well. HMI or tungsten fresnels will also do the job, and sometimes Dedos.

A Source 4 and Source 4 Junior firing beams through smoke
A Source 4 and Source 4 Junior firing beams through smoke
A Source 4
Source 4
HMI fresnel
HMI fresnel
Dedo, de-e-edo. Dedo come and me want go home.
Dedo

2. You need a smoke machine or hazer to volumise the light. A cheap one from Maplin will work, but as a general rule the cheaper the machine, the more its output will be wreaths of smoke rather than just thickening up the atmosphere. However, given time to disperse and some vigorous wafting with a flag or the clapperboard, any smoke will work.

ProSound GT-800 fog machine from Maplin
ProSound GT-800 fog machine from Maplin
Phantom Pea Soup hazer
Phantom Pea Soup hazer

3. The smoke/haze needs to be backlit. The closer the light source is to being directly behind the smoke, the more the smoke will show up. So shoot towards windows.

These frames are the start and end positions of a tracking shot from Ren (with a top secret make-up effect!). Note how the shafts of light from the window are much more prominent when the camera is pointed more towards the light source.
These frames are the start and end positions of a tracking shot from Ren (with a top secret make-up effect!). Note how the shafts of light from the window are much more prominent when the camera is pointed more towards the light source.

www.rentheseries.com

4. A dark background will show up the smoke best. If you’re shooting in a house with white walls then you’re probably flogging a dead horse.

The dark prison walls here show up the shaft of light very nicely.
The dark prison walls here show up the shaft of light very nicely.

5. Keep other light sources away from the shaft. Competing lamps can muddy the shaft of light or maybe make it disappear altogether. Often I find that shafts of light work well as background interest, with the actors well in front of it, lit by other sources.

In this set-up for Ballet Pointe Shoes (dir. Gisela Pereira), I'm using the layers of scenery on the stage to separate layers. In the back layer there's a pair of cool, high Source 4s creating the crossed beams, while in the front layer warmer Dedos create shorter shafts of light.
In this set-up for Ballet Pointe Shoes (dir. Gisela Pereira), I’m using the layers of scenery on the stage to separate layers of lighting. In the back layer there’s a pair of cool, high Source 4s creating the crossed beams, while in the front layer warmer Dedos create shorter shafts of light.

Follow all these guidelines and you’ll get lovely shafts of light every time!

5 Tips for Perfect Shafts of Light

Lighting Techniques #7: Gobos and Shadows

Gobos are shapes that you fit onto a lamp in order to break up the light. If you’re using Source 4s you can get gobos especially for the purpose, which slot into the front of the lamp.

Gobos
Gobos
matthews_wood_cucoloris_3
A cucoloris

A cucoloris is a piece of wood or metal with vaguely leaf-life shapes cut into it. You would mount this on a C-stand or clamp of some kind. You can easily make your own cucoloris by punching holes in black-wrap or cardboard.

In fact you can create patterns of light and shadow by placing almost anything in front of a light, varying the distance from the source to make the pattern sharper or softer. Be careful to observe the minimum safe distances printed on the side of the lamphead though, or you might set fire to your shadow-maker.

Here are some examples of breaking up the light that I’ve tried over the years…

On more than one occasion I’ve taped up some of the PVC pipes which my dolly uses as tracks, to create the impression of vertical bars or pillars. In the below example the French windows (when closed) didn’t have enough bits of frame to break up the light sufficiently, so I had my spark tape a pipe to the window…

IMG_2464

I don’t have a picture, but I remember once on a horror feature sticking lots of blobs of gaffer tape to a window.

In this shot from Stop/Eject I blacked out the room’s real window and rigged a fold-up director’s chair in front of a 1K Arrilite to cast a window frame-like shadow…

The bedroom by sunlight

Look for things in the set that you can shine lights through, like this partition window….

Creating interesting shadows by using a partition window at the location.

or a fence…

ss2

or blinds…

IMG_2531

If you want the venetian blinds effect and you don’t have any, stick strips of gaffer tape to the window.

On Ren I built an openable and closable little door (complete with tiny barred window) for light to shine through, since the set didn’t have a door.

image

On the same show, the roof of Karn’s house became a giant gobo for the 2.5K HMI placed above and behind the set, creating these incredible God rays when smoke was added. The roof was made of interlocking branches and had been covered by sheets by the art department – presumably to block light – but I removed the sheets because I wanted this lighting effect…

image

Branches make great gobos. I often sneakily break one off a nearby tree and rig it to a C-stand to cast some summery shadows or break up a moonlight or streetlamp source that’s looking too bright and flat.

IMG_1029-1.JPG

If you’ve missed the other posts in my Lighting Techniques series so far, here are the links:

#1: Three Point Lighting

#2: Cross-backlighting

#3: The Window Wrap

#4: Health Bounce

#5: Smoke

#6: Cross-light

Lighting Techniques #7: Gobos and Shadows

5 Tips for Successful Pick-ups

Discussing the next set-up on the Ren pick-ups shoot with director Kate Madison. Photo: Michael Hudson
Discussing the next set-up on the Ren pick-ups shoot with director Kate Madison. Photo: Michael Hudson

Recently I’ve been involved in pick-ups shoots for a couple of projects I lensed last year: action-comedy feature The Gong Fu Connection and fantasy series Ren. Both pick-up shoots were strange experiences, featuring some very familiar aspects of the original shoot – locations, sets, costumes – but noticeably lacking others – certain actors, crew members and so on. The Ren pick-ups in particular were like re-living principal photography in microcosm, with stressful crowd shoots followed by more relaxed, smaller scenes and finally night shots with flaming arrows again!

A CTB-gelled Arrilite 1000 stands in for the 2.5K we used for backlight during principal photography on Ren! Photo: Michael Hudson
A CTB-gelled Arrilite 1000 stands in for the 2.5K HMI used for backlight during principal photography on Ren! Photo: Michael Hudson

I’ve blogged previously about how a director/producer can prepare for pick-ups – by keeping certain key props and costumes, for example – but today I have a few thoughts from a DP’s perspective.

1. Keep a record of lighting plans. I have a pretty good memory for my lighting set-ups, but not everyone does, so keeping notes is a good idea. Your gaffer may even do this for you. I frequently use this blog as a means of recording lighting set-ups, and indeed tried to access it during the Ren pick-ups shoot but was foiled by dodgy wifi.

2. Keep camera logs. On a properly crewed shoot this will be the 2nd AC’s job. The logs should include at least the following info for each slate: lens, aperture, ASA, white balance and shutter angle. This can be useful in principal photography too, for example if you shoot the two parts of a shot-reverse at different ends of the day or different days all together, and need to make sure you use the same lens.

Production assistant Claire Finn tends the brazier which provides smoke in the absence of the Artem smoke gun we used during principal photography. Photo: Michael Hudson
Production assistant Claire Finn tends the brazier which provides smoke in the absence of the Artem smoke gun used during principal photography. Photo: Michael Hudson

3. Have the original scene handy when you shoot the pick-ups. Load the edit onto a laptop or tablet so that you can compare it on set to the new material you’re framing up.

4. Own a bit of lighting kit if you can. In the shed I have some battered old Arrilites and a few other bits and pieces of gear that has seen better days. On a proper shoot I would leave this at home and have the production hire much better kit. But for pick-ups, when there’s often no money left, this stuff can come in handy.

5. Keep gels. If you employ an unusual colour of gel during principal photography, try to keep a piece of it in case you need to revisit that lighting set-up in pick-ups. Production will have to pay for the gel once it’s been used anyway. On the Ren pick-ups shoot, after pulling all of my gels out of the plastic kitchen bin I keep them in, I was relieved to find that I still had two pieces of the Urban Sodium gel I used in the flaming arrows scene the first time around.

Urban Sodium gel provides the grungy orange light for the flaming arrows scene, just as it did last November. Photo: Hermes Contreras
Urban Sodium gel provides the grungy orange light for the flaming arrows scene, just as it did last November. Photo: Hermes Contreras
5 Tips for Successful Pick-ups