Lighting a skylight to look like sunlight

[jamesharding]

Hi everyone,

I have to shoot a scene tomorrow in a room with a small skylight in a sloped ceiling. I really want a nice beam of light to come through it and hit the actors face with some haze, to create a beam of light passing through the room. However, being England, tomorrow is forecast to be overcast... Is there anyway I can make it look like sunlight coming through the skylight, I'm fairly sure getting a light outside is impossible as we are three stories high, but is there something I can do to the window to make it look like a harder source of light? Any ideas are welcome, however crazy or interesting, we have a good VFX artist who could remove lights that were actually in the shot. Thank you!

 

[Tolin]

Put the light in front of the window instead of outside and then remove it in post.

 

[jamesharding]

That's definitely a possibility, I was also thinking of ND'ing the window and then cutting a hole to make a smaller light source, do you think this might work?

 

[Bruce Watson]

...is there something I can do to the window to make it look like a harder source of light?

It's difficult to make a soft source "look like" a hard source. You can move a softbox farther away to make it appear smaller, and therefore harder, from the subject's point of view. You can't move a window, but you can mask around it making the window effectively smaller, and therefore harder... if you block it out of the shot. This will make it somewhat harder light, but also less intense.

The "classic way" of course is a big honking carbon arc outside blasting through the window to light the set. The modern twist is to use HMIs. But if you can't do that, and you can't wait for the weather you want, and you can block the window out, and you can make up for the reduced intensity by adjusting your ratios with your other lighting, then you might want to try masking the window down. It could conceivably give you some of what you want. Just don't get your hope up too high.

 

[Andrius Simutis]

What about a grid? That might help in focusing a diffuse source to more of a beam, and won't require any post work to remove.
Of course if you shoot one establishing shot with the skylight visible, you're then free to light all the close ups with whatever you want to exaggerate the look.

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

Hi everyone,

I have to shoot a scene tomorrow in a room with a small skylight in a sloped ceiling. I really want a nice beam of light to come through it and hit the actors face with some haze, to create a beam of light passing through the room. However, being England, tomorrow is forecast to be overcast... Is there anyway I can make it look like sunlight coming through the skylight, I'm fairly sure getting a light outside is impossible as we are three stories high, but is there something I can do to the window to make it look like a harder source of light? Any ideas are welcome, however crazy or interesting, we have a good VFX artist who could remove lights that were actually in the shot. Thank you!

By blocking the light you will cut down the amount of light... thus run into the problem of a low exposure. Upping the ISO to compensate, usually results in more noise... resulting in an overall 'soft look', despite the 'source' being more of a point source.

 

[TheDingo]

To simulate sunlight you need a strong collimated ( extremely directional ) light source that is far from your subject. Being 150 million km away, sunlight does not fall-off, so you need to try and simulate this equal brightness by having your light source far from your subject.

As a photographer I've done this in the studio using tungsten or HMI fresnel lights, and placed them at least double the width of the set away. So if your set where the "sunlight" will fall is 15 feet long, then I would place my artificial "sunlight" 30 feet away or more from the edge of the set.

I also add CTO filters to warm up the color, as psychologically people always expect sunlight to be a warm color balance.

If you can't put a fresnel light far away from your set, then you can cheat the sunlight effect by having thin sheer curtains hung on the "sunlit" window frame and have a patch of sunlight fall on the curtains and parts of the set immediately next to the window. This would simulate late-morning or early afternoon sunlight when the sun is high in the sky and won't fall deeply into the room.

 

[RyanT]

I was going to say place a 1x1 mirror on the window and bounce a source 4 into it, but because you want haze you run into some problems. The source 4 into a mirror would give you a really hard source that would look more natural than placing a fixture in the window and removing it in post, mostly because its had some time to fall off.

The only thing is since you have the haze you'll see the beam of light going in and you'll see it bouncing off the window and coming in the room. If you can somehow paint that out though it might be the best option.

 

[jamesharding]

Thanks everyone for your replies, some really good ideas that I will try in the future. I ended up having to create a narrow beam of light and shining it from the room towards the window, essentially faking the light from the sun. Was semi-successful, turns out sometimes only the sun or a whopping big HMI will suffice!