Exposure

We Recently shot in a movie theater for a commercial that involved a few people enjoying a movie while food was brought out to them. Upon first scouting the location I knew that we would have to bring in a good amount of lighting due to how dark it was inside of the theater. However, I found that I needed even more lighting then I had originally planned for.

To light inside of the theater I used a 1k open face light into a small sized chimera(also called a soft box), bringing board ambient light to the room. I then placed a 650 fresnel with a diffussion gel to bring soft light to the side of the theater where our character entered from. Once those were in place, we set up a 150 fresnel with diffusion for the actor's faces and a 300 fresnel with half CTB behind the characters to mimic the projector light.

It looked as though we had more then enough light to our human eyes,however, the camera thought otherwise. With the gain on, the camara was able to get normal exposure, but it was as grainy as a sand box! I had to move all the lights as close to the actors as possible, remove the chimera from the 1k, and bounce the light from the 1k off the cealing above the actors to have enough light for the camera to get correct exposure for the shot.

Cameras are not as good as our eyes and need more light to be able to pick up an image.This is always an interesting thing for me to observe. My lighting idea worked fine, it was the amount of light I needed that I miscalculated for. Next time I'll be better prepared.

Travis looking at a reel of Film.

Signed,
-)_-.

Magic Hour

We arrived on our film set last week late in the afternoon as the sun was begining to set. The setting of the sun gave off a warm bright light, which we wanted to mimic for our shoot.

The sun shining on our set

Since we were shooting out doors with tungsten lights, which give off a warm colored light when used outside, we had just what we needed to create the effect. We set up our key light at the same angle and direction as the sun, to punch up the light on the subject. Then we used a smaller light to bring exposure to the grill itself. After those lights were placed we put up a fill with full CTB, to balance the tungsten light to day light temperature, and a smaller light with diffusion to bring soft light to the subject's face.

Our lighting setup

This lighting brought the scene the warm, early evening feeling we were going for. I enjoy using "magic hour" type lighting for my scenes because it brings more character to the shots then just broad ambient light. Warm, magic hour style lighting also brings about a feeling of comfort which can connect the audience to the character better.

Joe grilling

Signed,
-)_-.