Is their anyway to replicate this look on a next to nothing budget?

[dtjohns1]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oZ03sNTE14 outdoor lighting has been a big pain to me being a one man band man on a budget. I would love to get the natural look of this video when shooting in sunlight but I'm doubting it would be achievable without huge hmi lights that balance out the harshness of the sun. Am I right?

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oZ03sNTE14 outdoor lighting has been a big pain to me being a one man band man on a budget. I would love to get the natural look of this video when shooting in sunlight but I'm doubting it would be achievable without huge hmi lights that balance out the harshness of the sun. Am I right?

Couldn't watc h the video. The player hung on playing the all important advertisement. Personally I wouldn't mind people pointing to examples that didn't have a commercial in front of them. I stopped watching TV regularly in 1968, so I'm completely unuse to having to watch commercials... well, except after I pay 20 bux for theater tickets these days...

But for 'daylight' shooting there are about 3 ways to deal with the sun... find an open shade location, use a huge screen over the talent and find a back ground that doesn't blow out, or use big lights and match the sun...

The only one the no/low budget filmmaker can afford is the first... Maybe DIY a screen for the second...

 

[Greg Smith]

It looked to me like they were shooting with a big ol' scrim of some kind in front of and above the talent. Note that they almost completely erased the shadows that are characteristic of shooting in daylight, so I don't consider it a "natural" look at all, but it is a pleasing one. You can duplicate this kind of setup without spending a ton of money on the equipment, but it's pretty difficult to build it without assistants -- so use your budget mainly to hire a couple of kids to help you wrangle the frame and fabric into place. It also helps if you can minimize the area you have to cover and frame your shots rather intimately, as they did at many places in that video.

- Greg

 

[RyanT]

But for 'daylight' shooting there are about 3 ways to deal with the sun... find an open shade location, use a huge screen over the talent and find a back ground that doesn't blow out, or use big lights and match the sun...

He's got a few more options...

The few that you can look into that would be relatively cheap are getting a 4x4 shiney board and 4x4 frame of diffusion, maybe 250 or 216. Use the sun as your backlight and then just go very frontal with your shiney board if you want it to be flat. You can rent these items at a rental house...probably without insurance, for pretty cheap. Otherwise you can get a silver show card and shoot that through some sort of diffusion instead, it's just a little bit harder to control.

The other thing you can do is a little more involved, but it just involves silking the sun using any sort of diffusion rag, and then using the same shiney board setup as mentioned before as your key light. That way you can still keep the same stop as your background, but you don't really have to worry too much about where the sun is as you shoot all your scenes.

Lights are not entirely necessary, but they do make the process a lot easier.

 

[slondon]

Shoot on a cloudy day. Photographer's light.

 

[Michael Carter]

There are several flavors of daylight in that vid. The more diffuse stuff (to my eye) looked exactly like the sort of hazy days I've seen on beaches in Mexico and Hawaii. Sort of a thick overcast that doesn't feel gloomy. Shooting fashion in Miami, you used to jones for a morning like that - Florida seemed to get a really unique sort of glow some days.

 

[nejuicer]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oZ03sNTE14 outdoor lighting has been a big pain to me being a one man band man on a budget. I would love to get the natural look of this video when shooting in sunlight but I'm doubting it would be achievable without huge hmi lights that balance out the harshness of the sun. Am I right?

I have always found reflector boards to be of limited use on this type of production because the light usually changes so rapidly that the footage never cuts together. In one shot the sun is out and you have something to bounce, in the next shot the sun is behind a cloud and the lighting doesn’t match. Even when you are blessed with a cloudless day, the window of direct light is usually very short because the surrounding trees or buildings quickly block the sun as it moves across the sky. Shooting elaborate productions like music videos or dramatic scenes, you need lights in order to maintain continuity between shots. If you plan your shots properly, you don’t need as big of HMIs as you may think. With proper planning you can get away with nothing more than a 4k Par and 1.2 Par which you can run on a modified Honda EU6500is with a Transformer/Distro that provides a single 60Amps/120V circuit.

The approach that I find works best is to wait to shoot the establishing master shot when the sun is in a backlight position. Up to that point I shoot the close coverage under a full silk. Shooting the close coverage under a silk offers a number of advantages. The silk takes the directionality out of the sun and knocks down its’ level by two and half stops so now you can use smaller HMIs to create consistent modeling in all the close-ups. Shooting into talents' down side under a silk, I find that a 4k Par through a diffusion frame is a sufficient key source for a good size two shot. When shooting close coverage under a silk, nets behind your talent will control the background from blowing out.

There are a number of advantages to waiting to shoot the wide masters until the sun has moved around to a back light position. One, your background is also back-lit so the discrepancy in exposure between the background and your talent to camera is not that great and so you can open up to gain exposure of your talent in the foreground without burning out the background. Also, when your background is back-lit, it does not over expose because of the discrepancy in levels under the silk and outside the silk – it helps to strike a good balance. Also, your background looks better because it is not flatly lit, but has some contrast. Finally, with the sun in a backlight position, the shadows of the silk frame and stands are thrown forward, which enables you to frame wider before picking up the shadow of the hardware.

For more detailed information on using HMIs on portable gas generators, I would suggest you read an article I wrote on the use of portable generators in motion picture production. Harry Box, author of “The Set Lighting Technician’s Handbook” has cited my article in the just released Fourth Edition of the handbook. In addition, he has established a link to it from the companion website for the Fourth Edition of the Handbook, called “Box Book Extras.”

"Great work!... this is the kind of thing I think very few technician's ever get to see, and as a result many people have absolutely no idea why things stop working."

"Following the prescriptions contained in this article enables the operation of bigger lights, or more smaller lights, on portable generators than has ever been possible before."​

The “Box Book Extras,” site is also worth checking out because it includes other source material used for the handbook, articles by Harry Box published in other periodicals, related websites, as well as more in depth discussion of topics touched upon in the handbook. You can log onto the Box Book Extras site FOR FREE at http://booksite.focalpress.com/box/setlighting/ with our pass-code "setlighting." Use this link for my FREE news letter article on the use of portable gas generators in motion picture production.

Guy Holt, Gaffer, SceenLight & Grip, Lighting and Grip Rental & Sales in Boston.

 

[iHartVideo]

Great post, very informative, nejuicer!