Just binge-watched Crazy Ex Girlfriend - Guess Who DP'd almost half of them?

Such a cool shot Charles, the end result looks seamless. When I watched it on my 50" TV the first time, I thought to myself, "I bet they didn't have the time or budget to fly Rachel and a bigger crew to Paris to get these shots, but it looks like they really did shoot in Paris!"
Kudos to you and the compositors for such a successful marriage of your green screen shot and the plates. Very convincing. Green screen compositing has come a long way, that looked really authentic.
 
Hey, have not read the whole thread through. . .Charles: in the locations where it's basically flat/soft light everywhere with little accents (edge lights on actors, accents on walls/background), how do you accomplish that soft/omni/nondirectional flat light? Are you guys on sets with space lights or something similar overhead creating a base level that you then mold a little with other tools? Is there any way to get that soft/flat/nondirectional/everywhere look on little to no budget? Pretend you didn't have a removable ceiling, and weren't able to use spreaders/polecats/whatever they're called, had to light from the floor. . .how would you accomplish that? Back in school they didn't really teach us "lighting" per se but we had one day of instruction on it and were taught to bounce lights off the ceiling to lift the ambience in the room without creating a directionality. That's still my best guest. Tota light or several off the ceiling, or fresnel or whatever.
 
Josh:

There's a variety of ways to achieve what you describe. I'm not especially fond of the look of a location lit with space lights myself, it's somewhere between hard and soft and I generally try to turn off the ones nearest the actors and light them from the floor. On Crazy-Ex, I did describe the "waffle" ceiling in the office which has dozens of flo tubes pushing through diffusion.

Often when on location I'll bounce a light of ceiling, walls or even floor to create a little "tone" to the environment. A lot of times in reality, the ambient level in a given room is a combination of multiple sources and reflections so I'll try to duplicate that as much as possible by pushing through the windows and augmenting with other sources inside bounced of various surfaces.

I've done a few shows in the last year where certain actors have bags under their eyes and toplight is not their friend. In situations where it is unavoidable, I'll fly an opal 4x4 frame over them for closeups, sometimes even thicker to all but knock out the top light.
 
Thanks. I can't name every location I'm thinking of, but the bar where Greg works for instance, is just kind of lit mostly by this soft "everywhere" light.
 
I designed the bar lighting to be primarily motivated from the windows. A series of 10K's provided the effect of sunlight coming from outside, while above the windows another series of 2K open faces pushed into a long stretch of diffusion which carried ambience to the bartop area. There were a few softboxes above, notably over the bar itself, but in general we would build 8x8 sources (sometimes booklights) whenever possible as keys.
 
Hmmm. That sounds more directional than it looks on screen but I guess it is what it is. Don't have any diagrams or anything do you?
 
No diagrams unfortunately. Any given shot had supplemental floor lighting as I indicated. If that wasn't in place, it would have been more contrasty with most of the light coming from window direction. Here's an example where I used less fill from the floor:

cxgbar1.jpg
 
There were various specials for the walls that came into play more for the night work. But, just like a practical location and natural light, a bunch of units tend to add up to an overall ambience.

There were softboxes over the freestanding tables between the windows and the bar (you can see a chair on the very far left of frame from one of those tables) but we usually left those off or very low for day interiors as they tended to flatten things out too much. They were more for the night look.
 
so for that day stuff its not so much a case of deliberately lighting the walls like that but more a by-product of all the other sources doing their work on the rest of the set?
 
aYes. The only other thing on that wall would have been the practical hanging fixtures that are glowing the doorframes slightly. You can see all of those plus various specials on the walls in effect in the 360 degree shot that starts at 1:52 (fixtures at 2:13)

 
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I guess because i never get to do stuff with big units Im not used to how they work/flood the set like that. used to the extreme directionality of fresnels, and my biggest soft source is a 2x3 chimera, so...yeah.
 
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