In this post I’m going to breakdown a couple of shots from a feature I shot back in 2020. Nothing groundbreaking, a lot of this film we approached with the ‘keep it simple’ methodology. I knew we were always going to be pushed for time on set-ups, work in tight spaces and have a small budget for lighting kit.
The key was to mitigate a lot of the problems we might face on-set sorted in pre-production, choosing the best locations to aid in our lighting set-ups was a huge part of this. I knew the locations and production design would be crucial to achieving the look we were going for.
The first shot we’re going to look at is the wide establisher set in a bar, where we are introduced to the main character of the film. From pre-production meeting we knew that this scene was going to be filmed during the day, but set at night. We also knew we had only half a day to shoot the scene. Luckily the scene involves the character staying seated at the bar and dialogue with one other character at a time. So there wasn’t lots of blocking to sort or lots of angles to cover.
A few options for locations that came through were all great looking bars but they all had large windows a long at least one side in common. I knew we wouldn’t be able to tent enough of the outside of these to look convincing, the search continued and finally this location, set in a basement came up, dark wood paneling and no natural light, it was exactly what I wanted. The only downside was a fairly low ceiling and I knew for a wide we’d need to get lights up and hidden.
The Wide
For our upstage key we went for a Litemat 1 clamped into the ceiling as high as possible, which was literally just edge of frame for 2.35:1. We also used a offcut of black to flag the light from the barman and hitting the bar too much, in an attempt to isolate our subject with a nice edge light. The practicals hanging from the bar where weak enough to give us a nice level without needed to be gelled or dimmed.
We then just pushed in some soft ambient fill from camera left using a Litemat 4 so the scene wasn’t entirely backlit. To make the background more interesting we used some Aputure MCs stuck to the top of the shelves above the bottles to make them pop a little, these were set to cooler than the rest of the lights to try and get a little colour separation in the shot. Another MC was set to red and placed on a shelf camera right which would mostly come into play on the close-up.
The Close-Up
For the wide we brought in the Litemat 1, moved it round a little and used a silk to diffuse it, playing in the fill to taste and you can see here how the Aputure MC is giving an interesting red glow on the wall (it may have been in a glass cabinet). The practicals were flagged off to create more shape and remove the flatness they were causing.
