Light Falling from the Sky
Sunny days and ceiling windows on a science-fiction set are henceforth to be known as my worst enemies!
Today was easily the worst day of my lighting experience so far, and I herewith include all attempts I ever made at setting a light in a film. EVER.
We were supposed to film the American-sized tracking shot that was to be used as the opening shot for 'Broken Planets'. And while this idea, much like with 'A Good One' was lovely, it posed to be much more of a hassle than I had anticipated and planned for in my lighting plans.
Even though my lighting plans are based on our test shoot from before Easter and already incorporated the knowledge of its difficulty and my possible solution right then and there, I struggled a lot.
For the weather had not been this sunny on our test shoot. So while I had prepared a possible solution to our lighting problem, I had still underestimated the sun's intensity on a really good day and now needed to make quick adjustments to make the shot work.
That shot offered a foreground, a middle ground and a background to be evenly lit by me. The background was done easily enough, as I just bounced off the blue light of one LED, thus lighting the wall up and giving it a blue touch. However, the middle ground and the foreground were unnerving me to the point of frustration, as they were directly located under the bright sun.
I followed the rest of my own lighting plan instructions, placing two further blue-gelled LED's near the middle ground to, firstly, lighten the visible parts of the floor there and to, secondly, cast one blue light on the wall screen right as well as on the actors back to create a backlight for him. It was just about visible to the naked eye, but I hoped that the cameras would still pick it up with an adjusted iris. I then rigged the pink LED in front of the actor to give him a strong pink cast from the side and to wash out any highlights cast by the window above.
After that, I then double-checked the f-stop with Adam and Nathan on their respective cameras and collectively, we experimented with the numbers. As we could still see the splashes of natural light falling off of our actor when the iris stood at 3.8, I then decided that I would take one more LED and put it in front of him, in the hope that it would finally wash out the splash that I could not kill with either fill, key, or backlight.
After the entire setup that looked like almost nothing had changed to the naked eye, the images on camera with f. 3.8 slowly started to look somewhat like the images I had taken as an inspiration. I used five more minutes to tweak the setup a bit more and double-checked with Adam again. When the sun was shining down directly, the splash would still be somewhat visible. However, when it was overcast, there was no splash to be seen!
I did it! I could not believe it at first! I did it! It was just a matter of timing now!
Technically... Cause the clock was ticking and we needed many more shots to be done that day. So we had to film, regardless of whether the sun was out or not. As they were filming the shots, I was not able to see how the lighting turned out at the footage, especially with the 90° turn that the camera is completing on its track. I will have to wait until after the edit to know whether the lighting was of no avail or not.
After this shot, we pushed through our schedule and managed to make decent progress, even though we initially lost a lot of time setting the lights for this opening shot and making it just right.
The other shots mostly consisted of romantic flashbacks with the appropriate lighting and smaller dark shots that were now easier to create after the struggle further up front the set.
And as this day started out as a highly frustrating experience for me, I can really say that I have learned a lot about lighting.
However, I will know for sure after the edit.