cinematography

Shooting Against a White Backdrop

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Earlier this year I was hired to DP some promotional spots for Onstage in London. Onstage produces content for the web, hotel TV channels and the growing number of TVs in London taxi cabs, on the subject of West End theatre. The brief was to shoot interviews with actors and creatives against a white backdrop, to be intercut with EPK (Electronic Press Kit) footage of the shows or edited into montages like this one:

I’ve always been a bit wary of shooting against white screens. The danger can be that you have to pump in so much light to make the screen blow out on camera (meaning it turns to complete, uniform white) that the whole image becomes flat and you’re left with no shape to your talent’s face.

Further complicating matters was that, on the first day of shooting, we were travelling to the talent, rather than vice versa, so we were often setting up the backdrop, lights and camera in cramped dressing rooms.

Here is the set-up I came up with:

Set-up 1
Set-up 1

Yes, just one light. That one light does four things:

  1. Its direct light blows out the white backdrop.
  2. Its direct light through the diffuser serves as the talent’s key.
  3. Its bounce light creates a little edging on the talent. (I initially set up a dedicated backlight, but found that this bounce was doing a better job. Besides, if you put in too much backlight the talent starts to blend into the white screen.)
  4. The level of ambient light it created in the room served as fill. Sometimes there was too much fill, in which case I would have Colin hold up a black card near the talent’s down side (i.e. the side not lit by the key) to block some of the ambience and restore some shape and contrast to the image.

The next time we shot for this project we were in just one room, with significantly more space than we’d had before, so I plumped for a different set-up:

Set-up 2
Set-up 2

This time there was enough room to place the talent well away from the backdrop and light them separately. Two Arrilites blow out the backdrop while the fluorescent lamp serves as the talent’s key. Fill is provided by a reflector and a touch of edge light is serendipitously provided by spill from the cooling vents on the side of one Arrilite.

Has anyone else out there shot against a white screen recently? I’m interested to hear what your approach to lighting it was.

Visit Onstage’s website at www.onstageinlondon.com

Shooting Against a White Backdrop

Shadows and Ashes

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Colin Smith lines up the Super-8 camera as director Sophie Black pans the mirror.
Colin Smith lines up the Super-8 camera as director Sophie Black pans the mirror.

After an unseemly delay, here’s the third and final part of my series about lighting Ashes, Sophie Black‘s dark fantasy drama. Read part one here and part two here.

For the fantasy world dubbed “Toybox” by the production team, Sophie wanted a gritty, grainy, comfortable look. She was keen to shoot the scene on Super-8 and wanted to make full use of that high contrast celluloid look with harsh spotlighting, deep shadows and vignetting.

The biggest problem for me was how to get a spotlight effect in a fairly small room with an ordinary daylight fresnel. To get a circle of light small enough to fit entirely within the camera’s frame required the lamp to be much further from the subject than was possible within the space. I suggested shooting at night and putting the light outside the window, but the schedule couldn’t accommodate that.

The problem was solved by bouncing the light off a circular mirror. This masked the light into a relatively sharp circle, because the lamp was the entire length of the room away from the mirror. (The closer a mask is placed to a lamp, the fuzzier the edge of the mask will appear when thrown on the subject, so simply cutting a circle out of cardboard and placing it in front of the lamp would have given us a blob of light instead of a defined circle, because there wouldn’t have been enough space to put the cardboard far enough away from the lamp.)

Bouncing a redhead off a circular mirror. Photo: Sophie Black
Bouncing a redhead off a circular mirror for the sweeping light effect. Photo: Sophie Black

Not only did the mirror allow us to achieve a key shadow puppet shot which Sophie had conceived, it also enabled us to create a sweeping light effect for other parts of the sequence. Inspired by one of Lana del Rey’s music videos, Sophie wanted the effect of headlights passing by outside a window. We were able to do this simply by panning a redhead across the mirror.

The Toybox scene was shot both on Super-8 (by Col) and on my Canon 600D as a back-up. I set the ISO to 1600 on the DSLR to bake in a grainy look. I won’t do this again, however, because I failed to take into account the effect of the camera’s H.264 compression. The grain looked fine on the viewfinder, but once compressed and recorded there were lots of blocky artifacts. I hoped that the Super-8 film would come out well so this sub-standard digital material wouldn’t have to be used, but alas there were some focus issues and several of the shots were inexplicably missing from the reels when they came back from the lab. Fortunately the day was saved by a talented VFX artist who applied a very convincing Super-8 look to the 600D footage, which hides the compression artifacts.

Ashes is nearly finished now and we’re all very excited to see how it’s turned out. Meanwhile, here’s the trailer:

Shadows and Ashes

Poor Man’s Process

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The WidthScribe promotional video I recently completed for Astute Graphics involved the actress driving a car – except we ended up casting an actress who can’t drive. We got around this in a few different ways, including the obvious substitution of a qualified driver in the wide shots, complete with appropriate wig.

Perhaps the most interesting technique we used, and one which I might well have used even if she could drive, was Poor Man’s Process. Nowadays, most fake driving shots in films and TV shows are achieved by shooting against a greenscreen and replacing that screen in post with a moving background plate. A more traditional technique is to film against a rear projection screen – a screen onto which previously-shot footage of a moving background is projected in real time behind the actors. This was known as Process Photography.

Poor Man’s Process leaves out the screen altogether, shooting against a plain, ambiguous background that doesn’t reveal the lack of movement – typically empty sky. Careful use of camera movement and dynamic lighting create the illusion of movement.

Here is the set-up we used on the WidthScribe promo.

Making the magic
Making the magic

The car is parked on Nick’s drive, which is conveniently sloped so that – from the camera’s point of view – only sky and a bit of a distant tree are visible in the background.

A light behind the car represents the sun, and Nick chops a piece of cardboard up and down in front of it to represent the shadows of passing trees.

Low budget wind machine
Low budget wind machine

Sophie operates a hairdryer to blow Laura’s hair around.

Col shines a reporter light into the lens, moving it around to create the impression of the sun changing position relative to the camera.

And I dolly the camera side-to-side while vibrating it ever so slightly.

When intercut with wide shots of Nick’s wife driving the car for real, you’d never know the close-ups were cheated. (An additional trick we employed was to sit Laura in the passenger seat of the moving car then flop the image in post, for the over-the-shoulder shot of the pylon passing by.)

The drapes are to cut out the reflections in the windscreen.
The drapes are to cut out the reflections in the windscreen.

Poor Man’s Process works best at night, but with the shallow depth of field provided by DSLRs it’s now possible to get away with it in daylight too, so long as the shot is kept fairly tight and the road you’re meant to be driving on is fairly open.

You’ll want to vary the lighting effects you use according to the surroundings the car is supposed to be in. You can use spinning mirrors to sweep “headlights” or “streetlights” over your actors, or move a keylight representing the sun or moon slowly side-to-side, or even place two out-of-focus bulbs in the background of your shot to represent another car behind.

I’ll leave you with an example of Poor Man’s Process in use on a big-budget Hollywood film, Michael Bay’s 1997 Alcatraz actioner, The Rock. All the close-ups in the cars were shot static in a car park.

Poor Man’s Process

Tapering Lines and Milky Shadows

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Recently I was hired by Astute Graphics to direct an advert-like promotional film for the launch of their new product, an Adobe Illustrator plug-in called WidthScribe. Here is the result:

Laura gets to grips with WidthScribe on a Cintiq touchscreen. Photo: Sophie Black
Laura gets to grips with WidthScribe on a Cintiq touchscreen. Photo: Sophie Black

It was a really fun and creative project, working with a great bunch of people including gaffer and GlideCam operator Colin Smith, designer and make-up artist Sophie Black, actress Laura Markham, and Nick van der Walle from Astute Graphics.

I have noticed a recent trend in adverts for a milky, low-contrast look, and I felt this would be an appropriate project for such a look. I knew that we would be featuring crisp, contrasty vector graphics throughout the film, so it made sense to counterpoint these with live action that was organic, soft and diffuse.

In preparation I set up a picture profile on my Canon 600D with minimum contrast and sharpness, and slightly reduced colour saturation.

On set the front light came from softboxes, reflectors and natural bounce, though always with a strong backlight to prevent the image from looking completely flat. The backlight also produced lens flare which further reduced the contrast of the image by lifting the shadows. In fact, I decided that almost every shot should have a lens flare, to enhance that organic look. Often this meant that Col would stand next to the camera and shine a 100W reporter light into the lens.

Fake sun
The “sun” here is actually a 1,000W Arrilite in the garden. Lens flare and smoke soften the image, while a fluorescent lamp in a softbox provides fill from out of the top right of frame.

Smoke was used in the kitchen scene, again to lift the shadows and diffuse the light. By a stroke of luck, the direct, wintery sunlight I faked in this scene with a 1,000W Arrilite pretending to be the sun was replicated almost exactly by the real sun when we filmed the office scene the following day.

In a future post I’ll reveal the secrets of the driving shots.

Tapering Lines and Milky Shadows

Shooting in the Snow

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Chris Newman films the bandstand at Belper River Gardens. Photo: Sophie Black
Chris Newman films the bandstand at Belper River Gardens. Photo: Sophie Black
Flip-top gloves
Flip-top gloves, or “fittens” as they have become known amongst my crew.

Yesterday Sophie Black and cinematographer Chris Newman braved the snow and ice to get me some wintery shots of Belper and Matlock for Stop/Eject. If you too are tempted to take the opportunity of filming in a winter wonderland, I’ve put together some tips with Chris’s help:

  1. DRESS APPROPRIATELY. I’ve never been able to find full gloves, no matter how thin, that give my fingers enough sensitivity through the fabric to effectively operate a camera. Instead I wear fingerless gloves which have mitten-like attachments that can be slipped over my fingertips when I’m not operating. I am roundly mocked for this, but they work. “Wrap up warm,” Chris adds, “and wear sensible footwear with plenty of grip!”
  2. BEWARE OF FOOTPRINTS. If you’re filming drama in the snow, plan your coverage around the inevitable appearance of footprints as your crew tramples around. Start with wide shots and any other angles that might show the ground, then move on to close-ups when the snow’s been disturbed.
  3. EXPOSE CAREFULLY. (No, this is not advice for winter flashers.) If you’re shooting GVs like Chris was, he suggests over-exposing slightly but being careful not to blow out the snow. If you’re shooting people, chances are you will have to blow out the snow in order to get decent skin tones. Chris says a variable ND filter is particularly useful so that you can keep your depth of field shallow, and they’re “also very handy for shooting around sunset as you can lose the light very quickly and need to adjust the amount of light [coming] into the lens.”
  4. PROTECT THE CAMERA. DSLR advocate and Hollywood DP Shane Hurlbut suggests that ziplock freezer bags are the best way to protect these little cameras from moisture and low temperatures. Arrange the zip at the back, so you can easily access the battery and card compartments when you unzip, and cut a hole for the lens, taping around the edges with electrical tape. Beware that your camera may still need time to acclimatise to the cold before it will function properly.
  5. BATTERIES DON’T LAST AS LONG. Cold temperatures shorten battery life, so take plenty of spares and keep them in your pocket to benefit from your body heat.
  6. BRING A LENS CLEANING KIT. It’s “essential for wiping away those snowflakes from the lens and to prevent smudging,” says Chris.

Find out more about Chris and his work at www.christophernewman.co.uk

Shooting in the Snow

Planning VFX

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A few years back I taught a module on Visual Effects for filmmaking degree students at the SAE Institute in north London. Rather than getting into the nitty gritty of how to actually do VFX, it focused instead on how directors and producers should approach and plan for them.

Here is one of the examples I gave, using a shot from my 2005 feature Soul Searcher. Joe Fallow (Ray Bullock Jnr.) sprints down the platform of Hereford station as the Hades Express departs, bearing away the villain of the piece and the kidnapped love interest.

Finished shot from Soul Searcher
Finished shot from Soul Searcher

The train was a 1:18 scale miniature and was dropped into the live action plate by means of a simple, static matte drawn in Photoshop – essentially a splitscreen effect.

But what if I, as director, had chosen a different camera angle?

Alternate angle 1

To achieve this version, the model train would have needed to have been shot against a green screen to make it appear in front of Joe and the platform. This would have complicated shooting the miniature slightly, as lighting for a green screen can be quite time-consuming.

Alternate angle 2

Here we have the opposite; now Joe is in the foreground, so he’s the one that needs to be shot against a green screen. Since he and the station are full size, the green screen would need to be much bigger and would require much more light. And remember we’re now talking about an impact on the main unit’s time on a location, rather than a small model unit in a studio, so the cost implications are magnified.

Alternate angle 3

Finally, what if I’d gone for a camera move? Now we’re into motion control rigs, to record the camera’s movement on location and applied a scaled-down version of that same move to the camera shooting the miniature. Either that or the live action plate has to be 3D-tracked in post-production, and that tracking data fed into the motion control rig that shoots the miniature. More time, more people, more equipment, more money.

This is the first step in planning for VFX: understanding how your choice of shots influences the techniques required to achieve them and therefore impacts on the schedule and the budget. Stay tuned for more on this topic, and remember you can watch Soul Searcher in full for free at neiloseman.com/soulsearcher

Planning VFX

How to Light How to be Dead

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In September I had the pleasure of working once again with Lara Greenway – star of Soul Searcher, director of Hostile and The Runner, and producer of Hard Boiled Sweets and Danny Dyer vehicle Deviation. This time she was directing a pilot for a comedy web series called How to be Dead, written by Dave Turner. It was released online for Halloween and here it is:

The pub scene is my favourite thing I’ve lit in a long time, so I thought I’d break down what went into it.

The aim was to separate the lead actors from the background as much as possible. This was accomplished through depth of field (shooting at around f2.0), colour contrast (lighting them warmly and the background coolly), backlight and smoke.

Working from the foreground of the shot backwards, we have a crossed pair of Dedos behind camera, each with a half orange gel and each spotted on one of the leads. Hanging from a pair of connected C-stand arms straddling two of the pub’s wooden roof beams is an 800W Arrilite giving the leads a white backlight.

There’s a fireplace off camera to the left (in the master shot). To give the impression of it being lit, I put a reflector in it – gold side facing out – and aimed a 1K Arrilite at this reflector. My trusty gaffer Col wobbles the reflector during takes to create a flickering effect which is visible on some of the closer extras in the left of the frame.

A third Dedo, positioned near the fireplace, is trained on the skeleton hanging in the background.

Outside in the tiny beer garden is a 2.5K HMI that’s blasting through the patio doors. A blue-gelled 1K Arrilite, indoors but in the far background, adds further “moonlight”. Between them these two lamps are illuminating the copious amounts of smoke we pumped in, giving the whole scene a wonderful volume and depth.

Finally, in the far background on the left, there’s a fourth Dedo hidden in the entrance to the ladies’ loo, throwing a little pool of light on a painting on the wall. I also turned on the pub’s existing sconces to create extra contrast.

Hopefully there will be much more of How to be Dead coming soon. Visit howtobedead.com and follow Death himself on Twitter.

And if you’re in the Worcestershire area this weekend, don’t forget to come along to the film festival at The Hive where I’ll be screening Video8 and giving a talk about crowd-funding Stop/Eject.

How to Light How to be Dead

Lighting without Movie Lights

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After my last post ranting about the very limited usefulness of redheads, I was asked what the alternative is for cash-strapped DPs. There are plenty of cheap fluorescent photography-studio-type lighting kits available on eBay now, but they have their own problems. So can you light without any film lights at all? Yes, you can – and here are a few examples.

Check out my pieces to camera in the Stop/Eject funding pitch which follows the trailer in this video:

£2 LED camping light
£2 LED camping light

I was so lazy when I filmed this that even though I was only two metres away from where I keep my Arrilites, I didn’t use them. There are three light sources in this shot:

  1. My key-light is an ordinary, bare, domestic 100W bulb (NOT an energy-saver) clipped to a proper light stand. I wish I’d put it a touch closer to camera and a touch higher so that my right eye was better lit.
  2. My backlight is an LED camping light (£2 from a charity shop) propped up on top of a bookcase out of the rear left of frame.
  3. Behind me is a thin brown curtain through which daylight can be seen. Since I’m shooting on a tungsten white balance preset, this and the camping light appear blue.
Total value of the kit I used to light this: less than £5
Total value of the kit I used to light this: less than £5
By the way, if you haven’t contributed to Stop/Eject please do so over at stopejectmovie.com. We need everyone’s help to reach our funding total and complete the film.

Shelf Stackers (2011, dir. Tom Wadlow) is a comedy set mainly in the aisles of a supermarket – in reality a set in a conference centre. Colin and I rigged half a dozen 500W DIY work-lights to the ceiling using the method I described in a July post, in a line running down the centre of the aisle, all of them facing towards camera to provide backlight throughout the set.

I’ll confess there were a couple of Arrilites poking over the tops of the shelves, but often we used something much lower-tech as our key-light: a dozen 100W bulbs rowed up on a long piece of timber – the Cyclotron, as we dubbed it. The intention was to emulate the long, thin source of a fluorescent tube without the associated cycling and colour balance issues.

The Ikea reading light used as my backlight in the shot below
My backlight in the shot below

And here’s another one of me where I was too lazy to break out the proper lights. This is my living room, and the existing ceiling light – an energy-saver bulb in a spherical white Ikea shade – is providing the key. I made sure I stood in a position where this would illuminate both my eye sockets. I’m backlit by another Ikea product – a goose-necked reading light clipped to a bookcase out of shot.

Remember you can get a digital download of the full video, “How to Make a Fantasy Action Movie for £28,000” by donating £10 to Stop/Eject.

Lighting by Ikea
Lighting by Ikea

I hope that’s given you some ideas. And if you’ve done a good, cheapo lighting set-up yourself, leave a comment or Facebook me; I’d love to hear about it.

Lighting without Movie Lights

Why Redheads are Rubbish

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Adjusting an Arri Daylight Compact 1200 (a 1.2K MSR) on the set of Ashes. Photo: Sophie Black
Adjusting an Arri Daylight Compact 1200 (a 1.2K MSR) on the set of Ashes. Photo: Sophie Black

If you’re a Director of Photography working in the micro-budget field, you’ve probably heard this phrase pass producers’ lips many times: “We can’t afford to hire any lights, but I’ve got some redheads you can use.”

I’m quite proud of some of the lighting I’ve done with only redheads over the years, but it’s rarely been subtle, often been tricky and usually been time-consuming. Redheads are ubiquitous because they’re so affordable, but of all the types of film lamp on the market, they are the least useful.

They’re too bright for most interior spaces and too dim for most exteriors. They’re horribly inefficient, spilling lots of light out of the back and wasting a lot of their power input on heating up the room. They don’t have lenses, so they can’t be focused. And most frustratingly of all, you need to cut out half their light by putting CTB gel over them if you want them to match daylight – and those are usually the situations where you need the most power out of them, to fight the natural light.

(By the way, you should never buy the cheap redheads off eBay; they’re not earthed and the bulbs blow if you so much as breathe on them.)

In this close-up from Hostile (2009, dir. Lara Greenway), light supposedly from the match is created by a Dedo set to maximum spot.
In this close-up from Hostile (2009, dir. Lara Greenway), light supposedly from the match is created by a Dedo set to maximum spot.

So point out to the producer how much it will help the schedule if you don’t spend all day trying to flag, diffuse, gel and generally coerce redheads into doing things they don’t really want to do, how the talent will be much happier if they’re not sweating out half their body weight, and how the electricity bill will be slashed by using more efficient lamps.

And if the producer acquiesces, of the dazzling array of lamps offered by most hire companies, which should you pick? Of course every film is different, but I frequently find the most useful hires are an HMI and a Dedo kit.

HMIs (Hydrargyrum Medium-arc Iodide) are efficient, daylight-balanced lamps that come in many sizes. The 1.2K and 2.5K models are most useful. Both can be powered off an ordinary domestic ring-main (though make sure you have 13A to 16A jumpers), come in fresnel (lighthouse-style lens) and par (parabolic aluminised reflector) flavours and feature dimmers for an extra layer of control. They’re perfect for blasting through windows in daylight interiors, and they’ll also illuminate a large area of nighttime exterior.

The 1.2K MSR provides window light in a "real world" scene from Ashes (2012, dir. Sophie Black).
The 1.2K MSR provides window light in a “real world” scene from Ashes (2012, dir. Sophie Black).

HMIs come with a box called a ballast which regulates the power supply to the lamphead and ignites the arc. You’ll have a choice of magnetic or electronic (flicker-free) ballasts. The former are heavier and cheaper, whereas the latter are designed to prevent flickering of the light when shooting at a non-standard frame rate (which in the UK means anything other than, or not divisible by, 25).

The term HMI is used interchangeably with MSR (Medium Source Rare-earth). Although there is a slight difference in the technology, for all practical purposes they’re the same thing.

A 1.2K HMI punches through the window in a frame from Hostile (2009, dir. Lara Greenway).
A 1.2K HMI punches through the window in a frame from Hostile (2009, dir. Lara Greenway).

Dedos are very small spotlights, usually 150W tungsten, though other types are available. They come in a kit of three or four and are fitted with dimmers either in the cables or in a separate control box. They’re brilliant for interiors where you want to create a very tight pool of light that doesn’t raise the ambient illumination or spill onto other areas. If they’re hooked up to a control box you can rig them all around the room and easily tweak the brightness of each one without getting back up on a ladder.

Both backlight and keylight in this frame from Lebensraum (2008, dir. Raes Mirza) come from Dedo lamps clamped to pole-cats just out of the top of frame.
Both backlight and keylight in this frame from Lebensraum (2008, dir. Raes Mirza) come from Dedo lamps clamped to pole-cats just out of the top of frame.

You can watch Hostile at bravesoldier.co.uk/hostile.html and find out more about Ashes on Sophie Black’s blog. If you’ve enjoyed this post, please visit stopejectmovie.com/collection or stopejectmovie.com/donate and help me complete my new short film.

Why Redheads are Rubbish

Fire and Ashes

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Last week I looked at some watery lighting created for one of the fantasy scenes in Sophie’s short, Ashes. Today let’s look at another of the film’s fantasy scenes and another element: fire.

Sophie wanted a 1940s Hollywood look to this romantic scene set in a room full of candles. Shane Hurlbut recently posted a great blog about building an artificial firelight source, but given the size and layout of the room I didn’t feel this was going to work for us. When I lit the Wasteland trailer last autumn I used domestic 100W clip-lights to represent candlelight, and this is what I chose to go for again.

Sarah Lamesch and Adam Lannon in the "Hollywood" scene
Sarah Lamesch and Adam Lannon in the “Hollywood” scene

There are about half a dozen 100W bulbs hidden on the floor behind the bed, and another half dozen on a boom arm out the top of frame, again behind the actors. There are no other light sources but the candles themselves. To give a little bit of movement to the light, my righthand man Col is wobbling a reflector just off camera. More movement would have been nice – some dimmers perhaps, or someone lying behind the bed wiggling the bulbs a bit – but given that it was a closed set I felt it was better to keep things simple.

Col tapes the tights to a filter tray
Col tapes the tights to a filter tray

I was so focused on the lighting of this scene that it was only the day before the shoot that I realised the key to the forties look was going to be diffusion. By this point it was too late to add any Promist filters to our package, so I consulted Shane’s blogs on diffusion for other methods of softening the image. AD Chris was subsequently dispatched to buy some tights.

In an ideal world you get hold of some very fine silk stockings and tape a piece to the back of your lens. We were stuck with bog-standard 15 denier, and the design of the EF-S lens mount makes it impossible to put anything over the rear element, so it had to go on the front. Col stretched the piece of fabric across one of my Pro-aim shoulder rig’s 4×4″ filter trays. Putting the tights on the front rather than the back makes the effect much less subtle, but fortunately Sophie really liked it. You can see it in action on the still above, but I’ll leave you with a side-by-side comparison from a quick test we did on lead actress Sarah Lamesch:

Sarah Lamesch with (right) and without (left) the stocking filter
Sarah Lamesch with (right) and without (left) the stocking filter
Fire and Ashes