After a slow first day of production on my final student film I worked on, ‘As We Were’, my group asked if I knew any lighting tips, which I told them I did, and I gained an extra role of doing the lighting on the short film to help speed up production by shortening setup times. This was great for me as I love doing lighting for film and, while I was not the cinematographer for the project, I had now gained a more similar role to that, the role I originally desired.
There was one day on set when an interior daylight scene had been scheduled at the end of the day, and as we were shooting in February, we lost daylight quite early, a miscommunication between the cinematographer and producer. So the original lighting setup for that scene had to be changed from what was planned to something I was coming up with in the moment. This was daunting as I had never faked daylight before on this scale; this scene had a one-shot tracking shot going from the kitchen, through the hallway, to the living room. But, thanks to the amount of lighting equipment the university supplied us with, I had the resources to do it.
The setup is as follows:
The first beat of the shot was the subject standing in the doorway of the kitchen. I mounted an Aputure MC with diffusion to the top of the door frame, thanks to its magnetic backing, then set its brightness to 10% and its colour temperature to 5500K. This was important as it would create consistency between all the lights, making the fake daylight all the more convincing. This light would prevent her face from falling entirely into shadow, acting as light from the kitchen window bouncing off the ceiling.
I also placed a Swit E90 2×1 LED Panel in the kitchen, with brightness set to 50% also at 5500K. Even though the room would barely be seen, it acted as light that would hit the subject from the kitchen window.
The second beat of the shot is the subject walking through the hallway towards the living room. With the way the scene is blocked, the front door window comes into view. To emulate daylight, I placed another Swit E90 2×1 LED Panel shining directly through the window. While the glass is not entirely transparent, you can still see a distorted version of the landscape through it, so simply putting a light behind it wouldn’t work. Instead, in front of the Swit, I put up two layers of diffusion, making the window appear as overexposed as the outside would be during daytime. The swit was also put on 5500K, with the brightness set to 100%. While this looked very odd in reality, it appeared to be very convincing in-camera; exposing for the interior meant the window highlights clipped in-camera.
Additionally, I set up an Aputure 300d at the top of the staircase, which she walks past on camera right. I mounted the Aputure Lightdome Mini to it, to emulate the bright small window at the top of the stairs, and to break up the lighting texture of the scene so far, breaking up the visual continuity of the space.
The third beat of the shot was where the subject landed, just past the door frame of the living room. I mounted another Aputure MC to the top of the living room door frame, using the same diffusion and settings as the one in the kitchen door frame. This acted as a subtle backlight, just to bring out some texture on the top of the subject’s head and break her out from the background. But, overall, just making it seem like there is powerful daylight bouncing around the room off of the white walls like in reality.
For the main key light of the living room, I set up another Swit E90 2×1 LED Panel, pointed diagonally at the living room wall and ceiling camera right. This emulated the daylight that would have come through the living room window but with more direction and shape. To add even more shape to the light for this closeup, I flagged the left side of her face using a black flag rigged up to a C-stand that reached over the subject’s head from camera right, due to location constraints. This negative fill added some much-needed contrast to the subject’s face, so it didn’t seem completely front-lit and flat.
Due to scheduling conflicts, the two actors in this scene were not available on the same day. So I drew the floorplan and lighting layout of this setup, noting down all the settings of each light so we could recreate this scene. When it came time to shoot it the next day, it was still light outside, so we had to block out a lot of the natural light so all that remained lighting the interior of the house were the same lights I had used the day before. After all that, I successfully managed to convincingly emulate a daylight interior and have both of the days match up.
The following shot in this scene was also shot on the second day, and as the viewer had not yet seen the reverse side of the living room I could afford to make some changes to the lighting. By this point, we were starting to lose the daylight again, so I didn’t need to block out any of the real daylight. I wanted to create a soft sunlight look; I thought sunlight coming through the sheer curtains the production designer had put up would look great and suit the scene very well. To accomplish this I rigged up two of the previously used Swit E90 2×1 LED Panel, set to 5500K, both at 100% brightness, and blasted them through the living room glass doors. These acted as the general ambient light that would come from outside.
Then I set up the previously used Aputure 300d outside and had it shine through the doors too, acting as our ‘sun’. However, I didn’t want the brightness to be too high, as I didn’t think a higher contrast look would have suited the scene. Instead, I went for a dimmer sunlight look, as if it were shining through a cloud and the contrast between sunlight and the shadows was minimal.
I decided to keep this hard light from the 300d as the key light for the reverse shot close-up. Front lighting a close-up with hard light was something I had not tried before, and I was a little apprehensive about, but I think ended up looking great; one of my favourite close-up lighting setups I have ever done.