Many times throughout the semester the idea of cohesion in lighting terms kept coming up. In the early stages of forming the group assignment we collectively decided that both components should be part of a whole, and that however inconsequentially, the two parts of our assignment should feel part of a larger work.

This was criticised because, it was very unnecessary, the idea was of course to develop our skills, we felt we could do this by making the second piece different (to challenge us) but also to re-try what didn’t work on the first shoot.

Three light sources, this time using the sun as our key light source and LED Panels for the fill. Using daylight (in contrast to our previous shoot) enabled us to try a different look and style of practise. Michael was originally trying to get tungsten fixtures for the day but it didn’t come off. Using different coloured gels, we created various different lighting effects on the walls. With a bit more time on location than the first take and much much more background elements to play with, we were able to try very different effects even if not all of them were helpful to the story we were telling.

Furthermore, we experimented with using a practical light modifier. A magnifying loop was introduced to focus the light onto the diamond for one particular shot.

One of the challenges was consistent lighting through the space. Indoor light was fine as this light could be easily controlled and modified using the means on set. One side of the space provided direct sunlight through a window whilst the other side of the space had only reflected sunlight coming through which made the light not only softer but less intense. This comes across as very natural, (due to the fact that real sun behaves in this way) although the team felt it contributed in a negative way to the overall evenness of the light being reproduced within which was one of our key goals.

We opted for a different method to diffuse the space, rather than using a hazer with a heat element, we opted for haze spray which was much easier to control, partially due to the fact that there was no wind (interior, as opposed to the previous exterior shoot) but also because the haze was finer compared to the extremely thick haze juice that Michael provided us with last time.

Over all the achieved effect was a resounding success.

I always close every semester writing about the things I have learned in each respective studio. Many times I am sifting information and academia overload to try find something practical I took away, something I have actually learned during those four months. I cannot say the same of this semester. Unlike, every other studio I have taken there is simply WAY too much I have learned to fit into a little over three hundred words.

Every week was something new some nugget of Gold from Robin or Rory or Paul or that Production Designer (I forget her name forgive me), where to start?

 

1. I don’t guess any more when it comes to lighting.

Lighting is no longer a reactionary concept for me. I know what I want when I get to a scene, I can see the lighting I want ahead of time and I now KNOW how to achieve it and what it will look like when the lighting and modifiers are in place.

That isn’t to say once you get the lights up you shouldn’t move them around and make it better, but this isn’t step one anymore for me. I don’t start by throwing light around.

 

2. I can actually describe what I want to do.

One of the things about analysing lighting in class that’s super rewarding is drawing on Robin’s knowledge of what techniques might actually have been used and how just from the image on screen. It’s one thing to watch movies and it’s one thing to see how lights work, but putting both together, to be able to see something in the frame and be able to go, “this is how you do that,” is amazing.

I’ve now gotten to the point where I can actually describe to people how to setup. I know what the proper terminology is for not only so many physical objects but also, so many things you can do to a light, cutting and spotting and shaping and all the assorted ways one might do any of those things.

 

3. I’m aware of all the lighting all the time.

Watching a movie is completely different, I had always watched for editing and camera but lighting was one of those things that never really occurred to me. A lot of that is because (as Roger Deakins would say) good cinematography is invisible. Especially in realism, the key light always has a rational source and what fill light there is, can be easily justified by a real thing. BUT, that all goes out the window when you actually have to make it happen on set. Light just doesn’t behave like that and almost every scene of every movie I see now, I notice something about how the light has either been modified or artificially created and that’s the biggest thing I’ve gained, an awareness in film, in real life, of how light behaves and that has undoubtedly changed the way I make things.

 

Above all, I want to thank Robin and all my classmates a hell of a lot, this class has been something very special.

Light Meters.

How cool! But are they really useful when your camera has so much tech?

I’ve never had real setup time on any project I’ve worked on. Never a moment where an actor was off in some room being made up while G&E and camera took the time to accurately measure out where focus should be, get out a light meter and a colour checker and get everything perfect.

Digital technology seems to have done away with time, full stop. It’s just expected that you turn on the camera and hit record! Why would you need to set up? The camera does everything for you, “can’t you just autofocus?”.

It’s very sad. We spent a long time in our lesson exploring how a light meter might work and it became clear that one of the reason’s it’s extremely useful is when you perhaps need to recreate a specific look somewhere or match a very specific light level.

Hypothetical Scenario One:

Say perhaps you have an actress bathed in sunlight from behind at sunset with no real fill light, you don’t want a silhouette so you need to fill that actress. Conveniently, you know what f-stop you need to hit due to the sky behind her and the level of sunlight in her hair. If only you had a LIGHT METER!!

My mind wandered as it usually does in class when discussing technology if there was a light meter that could measure incident colour temperature. This, in my opinion is much more necessary in the digital space because,

Hypothetical Scenario Two:

You might be shooting in a very specific room with a really beautiful differentiation in colour temperature but then find yourself in another room of a different building that needs to feel like the same house but it’s all wrong. It’s just wrong.

A light meter that was smart enough to tell you how to modify the light you’re currently using to match something else would be amazing. Also I was admiring just how expensive they are and then I discovered something a little bit magical, Lumu.

It’s just so brilliant. It even tells you what your colour temperature is in fractions of CTO or CTB if you want. It’s just genius.

Rory, our guest at today’s session, is a gaffer with all his own gear (and A LOT of gear). After we all helped bring it all in, we were pushed for time as we made our way through many different and fascinating discussions about lighting. I learned so so much from Rory and he was so open about talking about everything and didn’t talk down to us as if we didn’t know things which was fantastic.

One of the things that I was really puzzled by was that companies have restrictions on what types of lights can be used on productions for environmental reasons. As Rory pointed out, the lithium that’s mined to make batteries and the processes to make LED lamps is just a different sort of environmental hazard. The only reason someone could actually want to restrict which fixtures you use would be people who are concerned about power consumption. Even then, some LED technology requires a hell of a lot of power.

Rory brought in a couple of different fixtures of note, the first, the Creamsource Doppio LED Panels.

I thought for certain, these things can’t have that much light output, they have so few LEDs. My understanding of LED Panels was, essentially, the more LEDs on the panel, the brighter it is. But these are big LEDs! It’s amazing just how soft they are, especially compared to my LED panels, which are similar in that they have a CRI of 95+ (same as the Doppios) and they’re temperature controllable, except that, they don’t have the reflector behind the LEDs and they don’t have as big LEDs. The effect is a beautiful soft panel besides the fact that it looks awesome as well with the metallic dark blue aesthetic.

Next was the HMI light, the history of these things is of course fascinating, but what was more fascinating was the sheer output of the light was staggering.

For the first time in class we had equivalent light inside the room to the level of light coming in through the windows which was extraordinary. The hardest thing for me was figuring out what possible reason you would have to use a light of this scale.

Perhaps if you really run out of time on a shoot day and need your own personal sun when the real one starts to dissappear.

And finally, this guy. This is the most amazing light I’ve ever seen. The number of possibilities with this thing are literally endless. I think, if you have three of these things, you can basically get any lighting effect imaginable, except perhaps a hard light source. Police Sirens, Any gel you can think of, you just pick it out. The only thing it really needs now is Bluetooth so you can control it from an App, cause the whole $1000 controller thing is ridiculous.

Aside from the amazing gear that Rory brought, he also brought a wealth of wisdom. It was awesome to hear him talking about the different setups he had done on Like Minds and other films.

I know, I know, I’m obsessed with La La Land. But Linus is a really interesting cinematographer to look at for a few reasons, firstly, he’s a swedish cinematographer who’s work is interestingly quite understated, yet very colourful, I think. I know it would be completely misleading to suggest that Linus is the reason the films he works on are beautifully coloured, however, what I am amazed by is how almost every light in every scene has a hue. There’s never just a bunch of white lights and the scene is graded to appear a certain colour, there is almost always contrast in the colours of the lighting in the image. In fact, one of the only times he just used a bunch of white lights was to intentionally contrast the pink sunset sky in City of Stars, in an interview for the film he said, “In Los Angeles there’s a lot of orange sodium-vapor streetlights, but we didn’t want them to exist in our Los Angeles. So we made them cool white colors in combination with the pink skies and blue nights.”

The Hundred Foot Journey is a lovely film, that has a very distinct quality of the culture of the setting of the film, similar to La La Land, though in saying that, Hundred Foot Journey is a much more understated film (obviously), but where Sandgren shines is the way he renders the juxtaposition of the French setting with the Indian Culture. The film has this beautiful love affair with old school lighting and Linus does an amazing job of using the candles from David Gropman’s Production Design to inform this very old school french look. Even though it wouldn’t be anachronistic to just shove some electric lights up in every scene, they do an amazing job of keeping the scenes extremely well lit and still feel punchy, intimate and a little bit colourful.

The first image on the left, above, shows a dinner scene that couldn’t have been lit with just candles. The key light on Marguerite is extraordinary how well directed it is, I suspect coming from right of camera and cut down quite a lot, accenting it, is this beautiful blue fill that just lights the room enough to create some depth in the shot. A lot of Sandgren’s look comes to his film processing. He always shoots film. For La La Land, Sandgren pull-processed the footage one stop to soften the contrast and finer grain; shooting on Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 and some 250D 5207 stock. Sandgren looked to Jacques Demy and his work on The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at the request of Damien Chazelle, the Director. Mostly for inspiration but Sandgren says, “Demy’s work is very impressive — so unique and unconventional. He had his own vision and I don’t think he really cared what other people thought. He just did what he thought was right.”

Sandgren and his team were often attempting extremely difficult shots that had to be filmed in short periods of time on La La Land to try to capture sunsets or because they had blocked up freeway ramps to get the shots. But Sandgren encouraged his crew to remember the feeling of nailing the shots and taking that feeling to heart knowing that every day would feel hopeless at different times. “There was actually only one scene that we couldn’t nail. It was in that green apartment when [Gosling and Stone] sing “City of Stars” at his piano. We were going to do that on a little mini Technocrane and we rehearsed forever and just couldn’t get it right. But we had that same instinct – “We aren’t nailing it, but eventually we’ll get it.” And then someone said, “Why don’t we just shoot this on Steadicam?” And everyone was like “Yeah, why don’t we shoot this on Steadicam? Why are we in this tiny fucking apartment in Van Nuys with a little crane?” (laughs) Then Ari came in with his Steadicam and nailed it right away.”

Joy is a rather unconventional film, unlike La La Land or The Hundred Foot Journey it isn’t finished in scope, it’s finished flat, which is unusual for that genre. David O Russel the Director of Joy loved the way in which film rendered flesh tones and really wanted Jennifer Lawrence’s flesh tones to stand out in the film though the two of them were both very inspired by black and white, old school film. A lot of Sandgren’s work is marked by the way he is able to heighten what Production Design does. In the case of Joy, he is able to take the very muted tones of the scenes and add life back into them with very colour saturated lighting, which still feels a little bit muted and monochrome but has a life and colour that exists only through lighting.

Linus often talks about each film that he works on “constantly evolving” at every moment, “even when [the crew] is asleep, the film is still changing, evolving”. I think the respect for that and his ability to adapt his style and his ideas quickly make him a really amazing cinematographer.

 

Linussandgren.com. (2018). LINUS SANDGREN Director Of Photography / FEATURES. [online] Available at: http://www.linussandgren.com [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018].

Mulcahey, M., Macaulay, S., Sell, C., Schoenbrun, D. and Macaulay, S. (2018). Pink Skies and Poetic Artifacts: DP Linus Sandgren on La La Land | Filmmaker Magazine. [online] Filmmaker Magazine. Available at: https://filmmakermagazine.com/101296-pink-skies-and-poetic-artifacts-dp-linus-sandgren-on-la-la-land/#.WuKNnS9L2-V [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018].

Sandgren, L. (2018). Linus Sandgren. [online] IMDb. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0761874/ [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018].

Last night, our group grabbed all the lights we owned, a couple of cars, Michael’s Ronin and a small smoke machine and flooded a church carpark with smoke and light. So much smoke, in fact, that a long range drone flew overhead at one point, just to scare the crap out of us. We were very lucky to be using a camera that works amazingly in low light, as my biggest concern was always light level.

Michael’s script was simple enough but really well constructed for the space we were shooting in, which is rare but welcome given the task was designed to give us the opportunity to experiment with lighting.

We arrived at the space and discovered a number of things, firstly that my battery powered LED panels are the greatest invention ever because you can pick them up and put them literally anywhere, they’re bright and have a CRI of above 95, which is really necessary for LEDs, especially when shooting with other lights that are the correct temperature and you can dial the Color Temperature from 3200K to 5600K, as well as a luminance level from 10% up to 100%. This meant that we could get the lights really close to the actors for close ups inside the car and control the lights easily to look the same as the long shots with the really massive “moon” key light.

We decided a few times to diffuse the already very soft light, for the sake of creating some spill on the pavement with which to bounce back up on to the subjects to give them a little bit more illumination.

I have consistently found when shooting at night that the background just disappears completely into the darkness behind the actors. To combat this, we used Michael’s smaller on-camera LED panel and moved it onto a tripod and just pointed it at the background of the shot to illuminate it just enough to be visible behind the properly lit subjects. We still wanted to maintain a good amount of separation between the subject, the car and the background.

The DJI Ronin, was beautiful to work with, it was very heavy after a while operating it, as we discovered very quickly. We didn’t have enough crew to operate sound properly, especially after Alec had to run, so we mounted the microphone to the rig as well as the recorder. This added a substantial amount of weight to the entire rig and made it somewhat top-front heavy too which meant that the most natural way to operate the Ronin was from the bottom with the ring handles. I detest mounting microphones to the camera, its never good audio, but hey, it’s a lighting exercise and we needed a free someone to smoke the place up. The other thing that I would have loved was a wireless focus puller, when operating the camera on a gimbal, it’s extremely difficult to keep the shot in focus and autofocus only does so much.

If there was anything I think we could have improved, we should have done a wet-down of the location before we shot. That would have added even more depth to the scene. However, all things considered I feel that we did a fantastic job and I hope that Michael is able to edit the scene and make something awesome (really just I hope we had enough coverage).

As we’re expanding our understanding of camera in regards to Dynamic Range and lighting for exposure. One of the things we’ve been looking at is an incidence light meter. We did an exercise where we lit a very simple scene and filmed it with available light in the room in building 13 but really took our time getting it right. Every single shadow was fussed over. The brightnesses of things on the monitor versus in the camera, making sure we exposed the shots properly.

Working as a class is good, good to see where everyone is at in their thinking. I think that for the most part lighting theory is vague though, relatively easy to write about, its very clear that lighting is a very obvious indicator of intent and a really solid way to stir a particular emotion, however, forming a solid contention around lighting conceptually is really hard. What I mean is, it’s quite easy to say “the hard lit scene has distinct shadows, and a bleached look which makes the scene feel hot and oppressive.” Yet, its very difficult to write, “the angle of the light portrays the character’s primary ideology as a self-indulgent narcissist.” This is a little bit frustrating also because lighting is so invariably nuanced and variable in any given film. Unlike camera which has a very obvious connection to the human psyche, gaze  and perspective, lighting is a little more tangential to write about because it’s not a viewer’s surrogate, however without it, there would be nothing to shoot.

Where do we begin with a script in interpreting it with lighting. One of the first questions I have learned to ask is “What do we need to see?” which seems like fairly obvious question, however, of course, equally important and implicit is “What don’t we need to see?” and the answer to that is usually more important all together, because often, there are things that we do see that are useless and just distract from the scene entirely but you can’t always get rid of them with lighting, and this is a really important point.

As we presented our ideas for Assignment’s three and four, one of our guests was a Production Designer who made a lot of observations, all of which lined up with what Robin has been teaching us in the sense that, Production Design is really really important when it comes to mood and making sure it locks in with lighting. If the lighting needs to feel cold, so does the location, interestingly one of the things she said is that “it’s not about adding to the scene, it’s often about taking away.” Which sounds obvious, but in the scheme of things, a lot of the effort of production design is getting things and sourcing things to add to the scene when really, the removing of things that don’t match the cinematographer’s intentions is most likely just as powerful and just as effective.