Lighting and shooting master in Afternoon, Coverage at night

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Orlando McNulty

Active member
Does anyone have experience doing this?

Two character comedic short, takes place in a restaurant with windows on one side.

The scheduling constraints of our location make it so I need to shoot dolly shot, and wides in the afternoon, and move into scene coverage at night.

Do any of you have any tips on how to make it match up. It's a low budget production, most of my lighting is LED's. Kinda nervous about it, and considering asking them to postpone to a time we can shoot the entire scene during the day. Would you postpone, or just do your best to make it match?

Shooting on GH5 w/ RED cine zoom.

Thanks!
 
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I have to wonder how many wide shots you're getting that you can't get any coverage off before it gets dark. It seems like with two characters it should be possible if you keep things moving, unless the location specifically says "no close-up shots in the afternoon."

To get more towards what you're asking - is this possible? - well, probably. Can you frame out the windows in your coverage and make sure that they don't end up in reflections? That's your first step seeing as how you won't be pushing light through windows to mimic daylight. What kind of LED fixtures are you dealing with? Some of them like skypanels and kino selects can get pretty bright. For close-ups, you can always mimic daylight coming through windows with a lighting setup that's entirely inside if you have enough firepower. But if you don't have fixtures that will give you a decent exposure after being pushed through a 4x4 frame or some other medium sized diffusion, I would probably ask to push the day like you said. The difference between natural daylight and a small LED fixture with no diffusion will be pretty glaringly obvious, but if you enlarge your effective source and can light up background elements, you can pull it off.
 
Orlando McNulty said:
Does anyone have experience doing this?

Two character comedic short, takes place in a restaurant with windows on one side.

The scheduling constraints of our location make it so I need to shoot dolly shot, and wides in the afternoon, and move into scene coverage at night.

Do any of you have any tips on how to make it match up.
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There are a few things you can do to make matching work:

Make sure you have good contrast with the day scenes you shoot. Hang a dark curtain or large piece of black fabric opposite the window to achieve darker shadows.

Shoot as loose as you can until the shot starts looking too different from the day stuff. If you can shoot tight, that helps, because you have a much smaller area to match to the wider scenes.
 
The most successful plan would be to to knock out the effect of the windows from the beginning so it doesn't change as you progress into night. If you don't have access to duvetyne or big solids you can hang, visqueen is a cheap enough substitute available at the hardware store (black plastic sheeting). I don't know the extent of the LED's that you have but if you can suggest window light by creating large soft sources coming from that direction, great. Otherwise, just avoiding the windows and their effect will suggest that the space doesn't have windows to begin with! At least you will maintain continuity.

I just did exactly this at a coffee shop that was all glass along the street, perhaps 30 feet long. We hung a 20x20 and a 12x12 ultrabounce along that wall, which blocked out the light and gave us a large surface to bounce against with multiple HMI's. This gave us perfect continuity as the sun went down. That size setup is obviously large in scope, but just letting you know what would be a standard industry approach.
 
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