Cinematography for a beach scene

D

directr

Member
Hello,

I plan to shoot a scene where an actor walks in a beach from ocean towards parking lot. I can shoot at any time of the day. My goal is to produce professional looking video, not a video that looks like home video i.e. not an amateur video.

I have a few ND lenses and can do manual f stop in my digital camera hpx-250.

I wondered which time of the day is the best and what other equipment to use?

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in advance.
Alex.
 
Shortly after dawn or shortly after dusk are generally the best times to shoot exteriors, as the sun is lower in the sky the light becomes more directional, which looks much nicer than when it's coming from directly overhead.
 
Long lens at lowest f-stop to isolate your subject. e.g. 200mm at f2.8 with an ND filter. Tripod. If not early morning or near sunset, then pick a cloudy day. Overhead sun looks horrible. Put something interesting in the foreground, like an out-of-focus seagull or a bum or whatever fits the mood. Even just putting the camera very low so you have some nice soft-focus sand or grass will work. And lastly put it here so we can see what you did.
 
Another vote for "magic hour" or "golden hour" near sunrise or sunset. This works particularly well in open areas like the beach as people and object will cast long shadows, adding a lot of visual interest.This is the one time of day you can work without a crew and still make beautiful images. Shallow depth of field is difficult with fixed lens cameras, but zoomed in and with full or partial ND and open aperture you can do surprising things.
 
Agree with others about the time of day, etc.. but just to post something different incase you or other folks are wondering how to shoot with direct overhead sun incase you need longer time on the beach for your set, etc.. with the really wide shots you can generally get away with direct sun overhead and use some large 4x4 reflectors out of frame as your fill.

Then when you move in for your close ups or medium shots you'd want to have a diffusion frame or something over top of the actor(s) and fill them in with either an HMI light or large reflectors.

Outdoors and especially near water it can be windy which brings up two points, if you are using stands to hold diffusion frames you must really take extra caution at weighing down the stands but also because you might be on a sand surface make sure the c-stands aren't slowly sinking into the sand which also can cause the whole thing to go off balance and hurt someone. The other thing about the wind is that I'd recommend using mirrored boards for your reflectors because flimsy fabric fluttering will definitely show up on your actors face and look god awful and of course distracting.

Here's a beach scene I shot many years ago on the Sony F3 and for this medium shot I had a large 8x4 diffusion frame above and to the left just out of frame and then a large 4x4 mirrored foam board for fill from the right. This was shot sometime between 1pm and 5pm EST and we were there for half a day but managed to keep a consistent look for the entire shoot due to the techniques I have described.

8092661728_a0765892ae_c.jpg
 
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