Low-Light Shooting

Modern digital video cameras can do a good job of producing an image when there is very little light. Unfortunately, they accomplish this by electronically boosting the gain of the camera, which adds noise. If you turn off the gain boost, you’ll have noise-free video, but unless you have a fast lens, you’ll have little or no image. The only solution in this case is to use lights. You’ll have to weigh the benefit of noise-free video against the difficulty of lighting. If your eventual goal is a video-to-film transfer, noise should be avoided at all costs. (More on gain in Chapter 9, “Shooting and Directing.”)

DSLRs are a popular choice for low-light shooting. Large image sensors, combined with fast lenses add up to very high-quality low-light images with little or no gain.

Battery-Operated Lights and Generators

Renting a generator might be out of your league, but for those situations where electrical power is unavailable, try using battery-operated lights.

Special Lighting Situations

Lighting does more than illuminate actors and locations. It also plays a key role in creating a believable setting, pulling off some types of special effects, and producing successful blueor green-screen photography.

With a little imagination, lights can be used to suggest a location. Here are a few typical ways to create a scene with lights:

nCar interiors: A nighttime driving scene can be shot on a soundstage using a few focused lights placed outside a car, along with a fill light. The focused lights should be gelled to match the lights of passing cars, street lights, and brake lights. Each light (except the fill) needs to be manned by a grip who will move the light past the car at irregular intervals to replicate passing lights. For actual driving scenes, small battery-operated LED lights can be taped to the dashboard of the car for natural-looking car lighting.

nDay-for-night: Use slightly blue-colored gels to create light that looks like nighttime and ND filters on your camera to make the image darker. Later, use digital compositing tools to matte out the sky and tweak the contrast ratio. There are several vendors that make day-for-night software plug-ins that can be used to treat your daylight footage so that it will look like it was shot at night. Check out www.thedigitalfilmmakinghandbook. com/chapter6 for more info.

nFirelight: Dark orange gels can make your light source the same color as firelight. Wave flags in front of the light source to create a fire-like flicker. A fan with paper streamers in front of the light can add hands-free flicker.

nOther illusional spaces: Carefully flagged lights in the background can create the illusion of space, such as a doorway.

140 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E

Lighting for 360º Shooting

Documentaries and other run-and-gun shooting situations require lighting that allows for shooting in all directions without any advance warning. Bigger reality shows typically hang lights from the ceiling to avoid visible lighting hardware. Another solution is to put HMIs outside the windows to create a fake source of “sunlight.”

Lighting for Video-to-Film Transfers

Lighting for video-to-film transfers can be a little tricky if you’ve never done it before. This is because the way your lit set looks to the naked eye will bear very little resemblance to how it will look after it’s been transferred to film. There are many theories on how to achieve the best results, but here are a few guidelines to help make your shoot a success:

nAvoid high-contrast lighting. Transferring your video footage to film will increase the contrast ratio between light and dark areas so it’s important to avoid too much contrast in the original video footage. Low-contrast lighting won’t look very “film-like” when you view your original video footage, but it will acquire a higher-contrast, film-like look after you transfer it to film.

nMake sure your images are sharp. Sharpness, or focus, is related to your camera and the lens, but it’s also dependent on good lighting. Any softness in your video image will be exacerbated once it’s transferred to film and projected on a big screen. Often, you won’t be able to see that your image is out of focus until it’s blown up and projected onto a big screen.

nAvoid hot spots. Overexposed areas in the video will look even worse when transferred to film.

nLight to avoid video noise. Low-light situations require that you boost the gain on your video camera, which in turn increases video artifacts or “noise.” Noise is similar to film grain, but larger and more distracting, especially when transferred to film and projected. So make sure that your on-set lighting is sufficient enough to avoid video noise.

Shooting Video for Film

If you are going to finish your video project by transferring it to 35mm film, you should research and find a film recordist now. Each film recording company uses a different process, and they’ll have specific tips for how to light and shoot in order to achieve the best look for your project. (More on transferring video to film in Chapter 18, “Finishing.”

Lighting for Blue and Green Screen

If you will be shooting blueor green-screen shots for later compositing with other elements, it’s critical that you light your screen smoothly and evenly. For best results, consider the following:

nChoose your compositing software before you shoot. Different apps have different needs. Becoming familiar with your compositing software and its specific needs will save you time and headaches later. See Chapter 17, “Titles and Effects,” for more on compositing apps.

nPlace your subject as far from the blue/green background as possible. If your subject is too close to the background, you’ll end up with blue spill (or green spill)— reflections of blue light that bounce off the blue screen and onto the back of your actor, resulting in a bluish backlight. This can make it extremely difficult to pull a clean matte later. If you can’t avoid blue spill, try to make up for it by adding a hotter orange back light to cancel it out.

nLight your subject and the background separately. This also helps avoid blue spill and makes it easier to create the matte. The set in Color Plate 13 shows how much trouble a professional crew has to go to in order to light the set and the green screen separately.

nLight to minimize video noise. Video noise can make pulling a matte difficult. Be sure the scene is well lit so that there’s no need for gain-boosting on your camera. If you can, disable the automatic gain boost feature.

nTry to make sure the blue/green screen is evenly lit. Because you want an even shade of blue across your entire blue-screen background, having consistent lighting across the surface of your screen is essential. A spot meter reads reflective light instead of incident or direct light, and can be a real asset when trying to even out the light levels on your blue screen. Most camera shops rent them on a daily or weekly basis.

nArt direct to avoid blue or green in your subject/foreground. This might seem obvious, but blue can be a hard color to avoid, which is why the option of green screen exists and vice versa. In Color Plate 14, the warm oranges and browns of the set lie in sharp contrast to the green screen in the background.

nDress the floor. If you’re going to see the actor’s feet in the shot, it will be much easier to dress the floor with something that matches your final composite shot—carpeting, wood, stones, and so on—rather than attempting to composite it later.

nScreen correction shots. Several compositing applications can use a screen correction shot to make creating a matte easier. Either before or after every take, get a few seconds of footage of the empty blue/green screen with the same framing as the action. Refer to your compositing software documentation for other specific tips regarding screen correction shots.

nHave a visual effects supervisor on set. They might see problems you won’t notice.

nPay attention to shadows. Shadows can tend toward blue, which can make creating a matte difficult.

nLight to match your CGI material. If you’re going to be compositing live action and CGI environments, be sure the live-action lighting matches the CGI environment lighting. If your digital background has an orange hue, it will look strange if your subject is lit with a blue backlight. The green screen set in Color Plate 14 is lit to match a CGI background.

nUse a 3D program to practice lighting. Believe it or not, 3D applications like Maya and Studio Max are great tools for mapping out lighting, because their lights do a great job of simulating real-world lights. You can use preprogrammed figure models in place of your actors and try out different kinds of lighting on them. You can even use a 3D application to do the three-point lighting tutorial earlier in this chapter. You can also use a 3D previsualization application like FrameForge 3D Studio. These types of 3D packages are complex, but learning enough to perform simple lighting studies is fairly simple, and worth the investment in time.

Lighting provides the backdrop in which your story will take place. Once you’ve tackled it, you’re ready to move over to the other side of the set—the camera.