Lighting advice please.....

[gstarza]

I am filming an interview of one person in a room that has a lot of sun coming in through windows. I'm new to filming so I don't really know how to control the sun, meaning increasing and decreasing the intensity of light. What would you recommend my bringing to help and are there any tricks to boost the light? Usually when I shoot, I put the subject close to a window and fill the shadow side with a white card. But are there any other good techniques that are simple and quick to set up? Once I used tungsten to fill the subject sitting close to a big window that I couldn't gel orange and even though I colorbalanced, the picture had a blue cast. So, I guess I should avoid that.

thanks,
jerry

 

[MattC]

I just took Walter Graff's class on lighting and we did about three hours on interviews - it was amazing! So many options are available to you. What lights do you have to work with? I highly recommend visiting Walter's site and looking around, great stuff there. He taught us how to make a "Graff Lite" for less than $20 and how to use it with a bounced key and it works like you can't believe.

Another thing he went into was selecting the interview location. Remember, you only need to find a 2 foot by 3 foot area to use. Once you've found that, you then make the set there, bringing props from other parts of the office/location. Oh and his stuff on the psychology of color was also great. If you're really into doing interviews, I think this class is a must. This guy has interviewed more people than you could ever hope to, and has gotten it down to a science.

Matt

 

[uhrgl]

I'm new to filming so I don't really know how to control the sun, meaning increasing and decreasing the intensity of light.

I'm not very good at controlling the sun either because I'm not God. If you're shooting narrative stuff in doors, daylight can be a pain.

If you have some lights, tape a blanket over the window or shoot at night. It's much easier to control light when you take out variables like clouds and the arc of the sun.