Please criticise my lighting

Egg Born Son

Egg Born Son

Veteran


I was involved in making a short last week. It's just a simple hack script to generate some footage for a reel. It was my first time working with a crew bigger than two and I loved it. I was responsible for the lighting. It was my first time lighting on location. A very different challenge from lighting in a controlled environment. In some ways it made the process quicker because the challenge was dealing with what was already there, whether to block out or work with the practicals, whether to use existing lighting as key or fill. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Given the time constraints and equipment failure (we lost the good monitor after the first setup, the built in LCD wasn't accurate and on the final set up I didn't even get to check it with my own eyes) I'm pretty happy how it turned out. By happy accident, working with the conditions I even snuck in a couple of things I've been noticing in films recently and been wanting to try.

I'm sharing this with permission. I welcome any criticism, suggestions or comments of my lighting in particular (I can see plenty of things I could have done better). If you want to make comments about any other aspect I'll feed it back to the guys. We're all only concerned with getting better.
 
The equipment:

The location was a football club bar. The room was pretty dark, lit to give the fuglies a chance with beer goggled footballers! The extras didn't need it. The practical lighting consisted of 30-50 spotlights, the kind you might use to light the entertainment area of your backyard. Except around the bar itself they were mostly dimmed. I guessed the colour temp to be tungsten.

1x 220W 4-bank biax fluoro (responsible for the blown highlights from the right on the close up, would have turned half off if the monitor was working)
1x 650W fresnel
3x 150W fresnel
2x reflectors

Did not expect these to be enough light in a big room but turns out they were plenty. I'm used to shooting with the light hungry HVX, so I tended to throw more light than was necessary. I now know to back them off with more recent cameras. The room was pretty dark, all lights were positioned between 8-15ft from the action.
 
The only thing which really stuck out for me was that you could barely see any of the girls, and the lighting that was there wasn't very flattering.
 
Because of bright subject and very dark BG the scene looks like some kind of dream - where reality doesn't exist or matters, so "bad" lighting might not be so bad as it accentuates the weird factor.
However if you aim was to be "realistic"... As many DPs, you are dealing with the fact that extras never materialized so your "INT. CROWDED BAR" scene turns into some weird empty space where you are trying to make realistic something that has no way to be real. This is partially direction/production problem but also partially yours as if the scene calls for "bros in a crowded bar checking out the the girls" you have to make sure that visually it looks that. I would INSIST on 20 extras at least to make the space look legit, otherwise none of you great lighting will come to light as the scene will end up on the cutting room floor due to its unbelivability.

Thus it's hard to give you a reasonable critique as if the space was filled with people you would be running into a different set of problems of how to light the crowd.
So lets assume the scene actually is: two guys meet for a drink after work in an empty cafeteria.
In that case:
use 2x 150 through some 4x4 diffusion to key the subject from low angle (low lighting gives you sense of "late hour"); the other 150w as some delicate backlight; then use the 650 to make a shaft of light in the bg to hit "inconsequential part of the frame" as an accent/"mistake" light; the kino you would use to add another accents if necessary.
 
I also think the actors were "too" lit in comparison to what else was going on. Maybe the space was "too big", maybe I would have focused on working with a smaller area within the large space and lighting more of it?

Funny we are always working with locations too small and bitching about it, and now we have a large location and it's hard to work with for different reasons.

The first time we see those girls I might have lit up that wall behind them a bit, maybe even with a colored gel although colored gels are really not my thing but perhaps it would have been appropriate there and worked? You have to test and try sometimes.

Cheers,
 
Main subjects look overlit to me. It's not always about making the prettiest picture, it's about making the look work in context.
 
Also, for what it's worth, you seem to spend a lot of time making excuses why things aren't as good as they could have been. Doesn't matter. None of that **** matters. All that matters is what's on the screen. "Well, if this had been working, I would have..." but you didn't. Something didn't work, there's always something that doesn't work, you roll with it and do the best you can.

Stories about challenges on set are only useful if they're stories about how you overcame those challenges. Not if they're excuses for poor work.

(don't mean to be harsh, just trying to give some advice. We're all in this together)
 
Back to my comment on "location" in general, another important aspect of that is "set or art direction" so again depending on the scale on the short as a DP you can suggest this or that but in the end if they didn't want to think about set/art direction and all the other elements that go into making something looks "better" on screen then what are you suppose to do about it?

For example a neon sign or something on that wall behind the girls would have made a better difference.

Just want to shift some of the "final look" over to someone else for a change than just the DP.
 
Thanks for all the responses.

David - I thought my biggest mistake was overlighting the boys but you are totally right. Failing to present the girls at their best is almost a crime on my part. They were stunning as well and I didn't do them justice. Not all my fault but I could have done more if I hadn't been so focussed on the leads. I could have also insisted on an extra 5 minutes and would likely have got it but I didn't want to add to the time pressure the producer was already stressing about. Sometimes it's worth making your case a little more strongly I guess.

Patryk - Good tips there. I was intending for relatively realistic lighting or as close as I could under the circumstances. Was pretty proud of it on first viewing and have only seen the flaws since. I think the low key would definitely have worked better. And the "mistake" light is something I have come across but didn't occur to me at all on the day. I will remember that one, I can see exactly what you mean and how I could have utilised it. I will pass on the suggestion about more extras too. I understand a few pulled out at the last minute but I don't think there would have been 20 even if we'd got a full turnout. Asking 20 would have at least given us a few more when some of them pulled out.

William & starcentral - thanks for the comments. Seeing how overlit the main actor is I could have used the 650W for the background (or the girls) fixing two big issues for the price of one. I like the softer lighting on the guy on the left's closeup a lot better. A lot of my efforts centred around working around the practical lighting and giving the main actors separation but it might not have been so much work if I'd given the background more thought. Something to think about there. Need to unlearn some lessons learnt practicing with the HVX. With a 35mm lens adapter a 650W key was the minimum on that light sucking combination. After reviewing this video I suspect the Sony had enough lowlight capacity to use the practicals effectively without reinforcement. The first light I placed in the first setup was to reinforce the spotlight on the table. Which pretty much dictated the rest. If I hadn't placed that light first then perhaps the setup might have turned out entirely different.
 
sonofaresiii - I genuinely appreciate your sentiment and I thought twice before including some of that information. I am proud of my first effort, especially under the circumstances but I can see dozens of things I could have should have done differently in the face of the same issues. I cut a lot of what I initially wrote in this post for the very reasons you mention. And more because long posts rarely get read. I'm not by any means trying to make excuses here. But useful analysis of what I did right and wrong is something that I can't do without acknowledging the problems faced if I'm to learn a better way. The solutions I applied could have been better. How much of my focus I let them absorb is worthy of self analysis. By stating the issues faced I might attract the advice that gets me around the next hurdle. I don't want my next effort to be a little better. I want it to be a lot better. I have a long way to go.

Secondly first day on set is scary. So many people to let down. So many dos and don'ts to learn and then remember once you're told. This site has been wonderful to me and the posts that were of the most benefit on the day were not the technical ones. They were the posts of people documenting their successful/disasterous first days. These are things rarely addressed by the experienced members who are able to provide the techniques and processes. Because of members sharing their early experiences in detail I was able to move confidently about the set, avoid most the faux pas and keep a cool head as things went wrong. Some things were within my power to deal with and some weren't. At my stage there is value in examining which is which. I earned a lot of respect from the others for my professional behavior and my ability to fit right in and have a number of open invitations to work with many of them again. My network has grown. This is perhaps more important than the lessons learnt about lighting and this one experience under pressure has been worth 6 months 'playing' in my loungeroom.

In outlining these things I am only trying to get the best feedback. I have no ego in this matter. Only the desire to improve. Agh, reading this back it no doubt sounds like I'm proving your point. Perhaps I doth protest too much. But it is what it is. Respect.
 
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