Attempts at Lighting Sci-Fi: Between Lighting Plans and Lighting Tests
The last seven days were characterised by a lot of research into Sci-Fi genre lighting.
From learning about different styles and settling on a lighting style, to picking a reference image and creating a lighting plan, to experimenting with the style, there was a lot of learning involved that I want to blog about.
So let me walk you through it.
Tuesday, 22 October 2019
Last Tuesday, and following my research on the Sci-Fi genre styles and colour palettes, I decided that I would take a closer look at the different lighting styles that are frequently used in Science Fiction.
For this, I ventured into the glory halls of Youtubeversity in order to get a first overview of the different styles and to see how other filmmakers approximated that difficult lighting genre.
Straight off the bat I realised that most online tutorials dealing with Sci-Fi lighting broadly centred around two different lighting styles:
Neon-Lighting (consisting of bold colours and light tubes as practical lights)
Somber Lighting (often using neutral colours and warmer practical lights)
Neon Lighting
An example Sci-Fi film with that particular lighting style would e.g. be both Blade Runner films (1982 and 2017) and both Tron films (1982 and 2010), Battle Angel Alita (2019), and Ghost in the Shell (2017). Since this style is currently very topical and a tell-tale indicator for Sci-Fi, I include this very helpful tutorial in the following:
What I liked about this video is the fact that it includes well-researched technical, social, and cultural aspects of that particular lighting design while still featuring examples. I realised that the bulk of that style is generated by the dichotomy between red and blue (or pink and blue).
Furthermore, what caught my eye with this lighting style was the fact that the used lights were often either bounced, diffused, or both, to give off a polished look. This look was sometimes paired with the use of a hazer to make space itself more visible and to give off a foggy look.
However, although this category is currently the far bigger one in terms of resources and example films, I found this particular lighting style unbefitting to my current vision of Pillars of Creation. What I could however agree with, was the emphasis on neon-lighting and/or lighting equipment, such as e.g. the Quasar lights, which create a light that is nowadays widely associated with science fiction.
And whilst these lights are really brilliant, a quick research into pricing demonstrated that it would require a bigger budged to obtain them – a budget that we do not have yet.
Somber Lighting
An example of that lighting style within Sci-Fi would be Arrival (2016). This style is currently not as much en vogue as the previous one, which made it a bit difficult to research and find more than a handful of resources pertaining to it. However, one resource I found was a video clip that featured the DoP of Arrival and briefly showed the interplay between his interior lighting and the production design of the spaceship:
Although this was quite an interesting read in terms of lighting equipment and colour temperature in relation to the set built, I felt that this did not give me enough to work with yet.
Which is why I then decided to start working from a reference image that I liked, trying to deduct and retrace the lighting setup that created the image. But in order to do so, I would first have to settle on the content of what I wanted to film.
Wednesday, 23 October 2019
Thus, I started Wednesday by settling on the visual content of my lighting and camera tests. Because I want to be able to use as much of my research as possible towards Pillars of Creation, I decided to pick a scene from that particular script, namely Scene Four.
In this scene, Mark is coping with the reality of his untimely and lonely demise by suffocation. Having ruminated for almost an entire day, Mark sends a distress signal into outer space, pairing it with a log entry in which he begs for help.
Because this scene is going to be a very emotional scene for him (and thus an important scene for the audience), I decided that I wanted to use this scene and experiment with lighting. Since I found that the mood was the most important aspect of that scene, I figured that lighting for it would be a brilliant test for myself.
Thus, I sat down and selected the part of the script that I wanted to recreate and quickly rewrote it to make it fit to Hannah as my stand-in and for my own documentation as well. Whilst I was aware that we only had very little time at hand and would most likely not be able to test-shoot an entire scene on top of experimenting with lighting, I still prefer to be prepared and have a couple of options up my sleeve. Thus, I came up with this script idea:
After all, nothing is worse than renting out studio and equipment just to run out of ideas of what to do once you’re there.
Following the script, I then proceeded onto selecting a reference image from one of the Sci-Fi films I previously analysed and which came closest to the mood I wanted to achieve, namely this one from Ghost in the Shell (2017):
With this reference image, I hoped it would help me understand the required lighting for this subgenre of Sci-Fi better; both in regard to intensity as well as positioning of lights, colour temperature etc. I furthermore hoped that it would serve me as a guide in case I came to a dead-end during experimentation.
Following that selection, and for reasons of time and brevity, I decided to recreate two shots – one MCU of our actor and one over-the-shoulder shot with the green screen in the background – which I storyboarded along with a couple of additional shots that I planned to get if time permitted (and I somehow turned out to be a wizard in lighting). In addition to that, I also added shots that Chloe would require for her editing. I’ve added these shots – currently all but one being static in order to prioritise time for experimentation – as a very rough, first draft in the following:
Lastly, as you can see in the shots, I have planned for negative space, as this is where the A.I. interface – created by Chloe – will be inserted.
Thursday, 24 October 2019
On Thursday evening, I finally sat down and created a preliminary lighting plan based on the reference image shown above. Although I researched the lighting setup of that particular scene from Ghost in the Shell online, I was not lucky enough to find anything in that regard, which is why I tasked myself with trying to identify the applied light sources in terms of their placement, intensity and their colour quality in order to approximate what my lighting plan could possibly look like.
Having conducted that part of my research, I then drew up my preliminary lighting plan in Shot Designer in order to wrap my head around the requirements of my lighting setup and to help me get started on the day quicker. Since experimentation is at the forefront of this module, the idea was to have a first draft in the works, which I would then be able to tweak as I went along.
And because I needed to cover two shots, with one featuring a green screen in the background that needed to be lit well, I thus required two lighting plans, which I devised as follows:
Monday, 28 October 2019
Yesterday I then finally moved onto the practical lighting tests. Because our studio time is currently limited to roughly two hours per person and week, it was obvious from the start that I would need to come in prepared and execute my plans as quickly as possible.
Starting at 14:45, Hannah and I fetched our equipment and started setting up in the studio at about 15.00 – giving us four hours in total to make it work.
We started out dressing the set by removing all the curtains from the background, thus exposing the white wall (and some HUGE huntsmen spiders). Whilst I am aware that this runs contrary to the setting of my reference image, thus making it more difficult or even impossible to replicate it, I still removed the black and green curtains and lit my entire shot against a white wall.
This I did in anticipation of our set for the FMP, as we will be having a lot of white in the background and as a part of the set. I figured, that if I managed to make a white wall look darker, moody and more intriguing in the frame, I would have picked up a valuable skill along the way as well.
Having dressed the set and set up the lighting according to my lighting plan, we finally set about conducting my experiments.
General Lighting Setup
As such, I first started out with all the lights turned on; assessing the image. Then, step-by-step, I changed one factor at a time to see how the new lighting setup affected the image. With every tweak I made, I recorded a clip to let you guys see how it influenced the image. I filmed these shots using the Sigma 24-105mm f/4 at 35mm, with the aperture wide open and the white-balance set to 5,500K.
These are screenshots of the – currently still ungraded – clips of my MCU as they appeared in-camera – thank you, Hannah, for being my stand-in:
Clip 1
This was the setup I started out with. Although I like the interplay between backlight and key in the foreground of the image – especially in terms of colour – the background (visible in the left half of the frame) – althought lit – is dull, boring and flat. Furthermore, unless Hannah looks up, there is no eyelight visible, and her face lacks a neutral light that makes her features more visible.
Clip 2
For this shot, I turned the backlight behind the TV on to accentuate it and give the background of the image more light. Altough the contrast is somewhat nice regarding opposite colours, the lighting of Hannah in the foreground now seems too strong and artificial, rendering her flat. Furthermore, the background now distracts from the foreground, which is not what I aimed for.
Clip 3
Thus, for this image, I decided to reduce the blue key light on Hannah from ¾ intensity to ¼ intensity. Although the image now appears dark and moody, her face is now also much too dark and lacks an eye-light. Here, I truly realised how the sensor picks up less than what my eyes pick up.
Clip 4
I then proceeded by firing the key-light back up to 50%, which led to the image above. I personally now find the foreground and the background much more balanced in relation towards each other. However, I was still missing a somewhat neutral light on Hannah’s face.
Clip 5
For this shot then, I added another (white) light to serve as a key-light and set it to an intensity of 50%. With this image, I realised that this light now was too strong at the shoulder, and although some the blues are still there, the scene now has more resemblance with a night scene than with the Sci-Fi genre. Furthermore, I realised that the colour of the key-light now was not matching the colour of the backlight.
Clip 6
Because I wasn’t happy with the lighting, I decided to move the white key light into Hannah’s profile, just slightly out of shot. With this, I feel that there are now more dimensions and more contrast brought to Hannah’s face. However, this also led to the left half of her face (frame right) to look too dark and untextured.
Clip 7
Since I realised that the light in the background of the TV might have more influence on the image, I then proceeded onto gelling it with a blue gel to see the different effect. With this change of the background light – and the lack of spill – surprisingly enough, the foreground changed as well. There is not more texture on Hannah’s face. Although the key-light is now – at least in the edit – still a bit too strong (it seemed fine in camera on set), I do like that her left eye is now also slightly lit more.
However, I'm not too happy about the colour temperature of the key light, now that I'm watching the clips back on a different monitor.
And this is now the lighting plan for the second to last image:
Tweaking Aperture and White-Balance
Following this experiment, and after we conducted Hannah’s lens whacking tests, I decided to have another take at my setup by tweaking the aperture and white balance of the camera to see how it affected the exposure of the image – and whether I was getting closer to the desired look.
This is the look of the scene with a white-balance of 5,500K (as I set previously):
And this is the look of the scene with a white-balance of 3,200K:
With this little test, I realised that the in-camera result of the second image seemed better to me while being on set as it looked even more like Sci-Fi. However, when watching the uncorrected and ungraded clips back on my home monitor, I realised that the image appeared differently and I actually liked the previous setting better in terms of colour spectrum.
Which goes to show that using an additional monitor and a LUT to preview on set might actually be a good idea when moving forward to production. Or using extensive camera tests, as I aim to in the further course of this module.
Sci-Fi Lighting for Green Screen
Lastly, having about half an hour left before we had to pack up and return the equipment, I decided that we would give our second lighting setup incorporating the green screen a quick shot. Whilst I was not optimistic that this would yield any usable results with this short time for a setup, I was surprised to see that the result looked nice (as far as you can tell without actually applying the chroma key in post.
As such, this was the result filming with tungsten whitebalance and a shutter speed of 1/50 (done by me):
And this was the result filming with tungsten whitebalance and a shutter speed of 1/100 (done by Hannah):
My General Learning
Apart from getting a better feel for the dynamic range of the Blackmagic Mini Ursa Pro 4.6k and thus their displayed lighting and colours, I realised that I still struggle shooting flat on set without having a monitor displaying log 709.
I furthermore realised that I would require the lighting to be a lot stronger than I initially anticipated. While my own eyes would be able to pick up the light bouncing off of any surface, the camera sometimes did not pick them up at all.
I realised that I do not like working with the LEDgos on the rig and that I prefer the Felloni2s to them. Regardless of their distance and setting of the LEDgo, and regardless of further equipment like barn doors, I felt like these lights would just wash out anything its light would touch, making surfaces and faces look flat and boring on camera.
Although I was not able to recreate the reference image, it helped me a lot in understanding the Sci-Fi lighting style and in training my eye not only for an improved position of lights, but also in terms of colour recognition and memory. I've realised that the lighting in the reference image went more towards greys and greens than blues and whites. However, I will need to revisit this aspect since I did not yet have the chance to perform colour correction and colour grade on my images.
In comparison to my reference image, I furthermore realised that space itself – not objects, but space itself – can be lit as well. Whilst parts of my own images kept falling flat regardless of how much I manipulated a light’s intensity, position, distance, or colour temperature, looking back on the reference image I realised that some parts of the image itself did seem like they were filled with coloured light. And then it hit me:
DoP Jess Hall would have most likely used a hazer to fill the space with particles, which, in turn, would reflect the light and thus be made visible on the two-dimensional plane. Because of this, I once more ventured online after my practical experimentation and found this helpful tutorial:
Looks neat. In fact, it looks really neat. Thus, I decided that, if feasible, I will thus either return to conducting lighting tests using the hazer at a later date, or I will incorporate the hazer during my camera tests if that does not end up defeating the purpose.
References:
CookeOpticsTV (2018) The cinematography of Arrival || Bradford Young || Spotlight [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSbbtSdf500&list=PLRG4t0YYtkIzejIqbZ-qKOLjQchEri9ev&index=2&t=0s [Accessed on 22 October 2019]
Film Riot (2014) Get a Sci-Fi Look with Dry Ice & Fog! [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APTf1HwzRR4&list=PLRG4t0YYtkIzejIqbZ-qKOLjQchEri9ev&index=12&t=0s [Accessed on 22 October 2019]
Kosinski, J. (2010) Tron: Legacy [DVD] USA: Walt Disney Pictures et.al.
KyleKallgrenBHH (2018) Bisexual Lighting: the Rise of Pink, Purple, and Blue [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gU3IA4u-J8&list=PLRG4t0YYtkIzejIqbZ-qKOLjQchEri9ev&index=16&t=0s [Accessed on 22 October 2019]
Lisberger, S. (1982) Tron [DVD] USA: Walt Disney Pictures and Lisberger/Kushner
Michael Walsh (2015) Sci-Fi Lighting Tutorial [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USFLja74L-M&list=PLRG4t0YYtkIzejIqbZ-qKOLjQchEri9ev&index=19&t=0s [Accessed on 22 October 2019]
Paramount Movies (2017) ARRIVAL | Production Design and Cinematography | Official Behind the Scenes [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrCpOK02osU&list=PLRG4t0YYtkIzejIqbZ-qKOLjQchEri9ev&index=3&t=0s [Accessed on 22 October 2019]
Ranker Film (n.d.) Great Movies with a Neon Aesthetic [online] Available at: https://www.ranker.com/list/neon-lights-movies/ranker-film [Accessed on 22 October 2019]
Rodriguez, R. (2019) Battle Angel Alita [DVD] USA: Twentieth Century Fox et.al.
Sanders, R. (2017) Ghost in the Shell [DVD] USA et.al.: Paramount Pictures et.al. Image taken from: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1219827/mediaviewer/rm1164969472 [Accessed on 29 October 2019]
Scott, R. (1982) Blade Runner [DVD] USA: The Ladd Company
The Lighting Channel (2017) How To: Sci-Fi Lighting [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVmuGMJl11I&list=PLRG4t0YYtkIzejIqbZ-qKOLjQchEri9ev&index=20&t=0s [Accessed on 22 October 2019]
Uphill Cinema (2017) Quasar Science LED Lights: Hands On Review & Lighting Examples [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChKDfpVh0dw&list=PLRG4t0YYtkIzejIqbZ-qKOLjQchEri9ev&index=18&t=1s [Accessed on 22 October 2019]
Villeneuve, D. (2016) Arrival [DVD] USA, Canada, and India: Lava Bear Films et.al.
Villeneuve, D. (2017) Blade Runner 2049 [DVD] USA et.al.: Alcon Entertainment et.al.