Okay, I have not lit anything like this before...

Hey Charles great take on things, I certainly enjoyed reading your post and your perspective.
+1

I know I want to pull off the widest shot possible.
It will cover the entire back (West) and about 1/4 of the windows on the side (North), and a wall that is on the other side (South).
Its a revealing shot of the room as the guests enter the room and the camera dollies back from the center of the room revealing the room, the amount of people and the rooms big size.
*The people will be entering from the corner of SW. There is a little gathering room there where we will squeeze the people in and pretend the entrance is through there.

The other time we will shoot wide shots is reaction shots. Pointing more into the corner to see more of the room and make it appear larger. But, by the way you described the method of opening/closing the blinds, I may crap this idea and just shoot straight West with a sideways dolly or something like that.

Here is a picture of the windows exposed to f/22.
IMG_0199 - Copy.JPG
 
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Cool.

One thing that gives me pause about those blinds--they look suspiciously uniform, like they are motorized and all the blinds on a side of the room operate together. Is that the case? Not the end of the world--you can still shape the light with solids or duvetyne. And this would actually make it easy to do the ND trick I mentioned, where you only cover a percentage of the window--you just bring the blinds down as shown in the picture to the point where they match up with the end of the gel, for the wide shots (and raise the blinds for that top light edge on the closeups.
 
CP - A side note on ND - just a question but also relevant to this thread

if you are shooting a tight could you put ND in a 4X4 or 4X8 frame and place it inside the room far enough back to be out of focus?

I guess it would have to be stretched super tight and may pick up reflection (as could a window in the BG of any shot lit internal) ..

nd.jpg


S
 
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From what I saw, being only in the room for a few minutes, I do believe they are all manual and each one can close individually, not all together
 
Sure, that can work. It is tough to get the ND tight enough on a frame to be photographable as you noted. You have to flag any light source in the room, and obviously it helps to be quite shallow in focus to avoid seeing anything on the surface of the gel. I think I've done it for a headshot but I can't quite remember. You'd have to be quite tight on the subject though, to be able to keep it inside a standard size of gel without the frame having to be close to the subject.
 
Michael, have you done the shoot yet? Any post-mortem you want to share?
Nope.
I just wrapped shooting a commercial and I am shooting other scenes at the moment for this film, but the main stuff such as this will be in the last week of November.

However because of our budget cutbacks that we encountered, and because lighting this room will require a bit of money, we are looking at shooting at a closed off council room without windows to make things simpler.
But, that is still undetermined.
 
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