Co’s pretty much correct on both images below. In an early screen test, we shot at Tom’s apartment and realized that it has some very beautiful natural light. Very often it seems as though there’s an inclination to light everything. Sometimes even though natural light looks beautiful, actually lighting a scene makes more sense for continuity, controlability, etc etc….In the case of Toms apartment, we knew that we wanted to shoot with the natural light, and so we did! We weren’t there for very long, and so continuity wasn’t going to be an issue. There was plenty of light in there, and we were stopped down to a 2.8 on the 50mm lens. An added bonus is a shot where Paul (played by Luke Clements) is in silhouette at the window looking out upon an element that will be added digitally. Coincidentally, the silhouette provides a very clean edge “live matte” that will make it a lot easier for the FX people to add our digital elements in the background.
Co and I scouted the kitchen scene the night before we shot, and I pretty much decided that I would supplement the lighting that already existed in the kitchen- and for the most part, we just went with the existing light! We had two 4′ 4 bank flourescent fixtures with 5000k tubes, and those provided all of the additional light that we needed. We shot the screenshot below on the 50mm, and we were wide open at f1.4. Normally, I try to not shoot wide open because I feel the image loses sharpness, but in this case I felt that the existing light worked so well that we just went with the wide open lens. and brought in light where we could.
In the end, I feel that the scene has exactly the look we wanted, and a nice side effect of using natural/existing light is that the scene looks “un-lit”. As I thought about it, I also realized that the natural light of the apartment provides a nice transition state from the unnatural, manmade kitchen light to the very earthy feel of the cabin.
A small tangent about our camera setup- When shooting film, whether it be stills or motion, the sensitivity of the emulsion is referred to as the ISO. In simple terms, the higher the ISO number, the more sensitive the film is to light. You might say well, so what? Films with a higher ISO tend to yield more “grain” in the final image. With modern film stocks, this has become less of an issue, but often times in the “olden days”, movies were photographed with effective ISO’s as little as 25! To put it into perspective- your mom probably took photos at your 8th birthday party using 400-800 speed film. Now, as time went on so did advances in film but even so, it wasn’t too long ago that motion pictures were still being photographed at 100 ISO. Essentially, this means you need a ton of light to expose your subject! When outdoors, this isn’t so much of a problem since the sun is ridiculously bright, but when you consider lighting a subject that would otherwise be completely black, you really have to pump in the light.
FORGE was shot digitally, but the rules of ISO still apply, and the factors that go into lighting an image captured on film or on digital are exactly the same. Through testing and reading about other experiences, we pretty much surmised that the effective sensitivity of the HVX200 is around 320 ISO. Not too shabby! But here’s the hitch, we weren’t just using the HVX alone- we were taking advantage of the Letus Extreme 35mm adapter. A large part of the “look” of the film is thanks to the 35mm adapter we were using, but it does come at a price. In simple terms, this device allows 35mm still lenses to be mounted on the front of the HVX, that would otherwise have just a fixed lens. Without getting too much into the physics of light and optics that go on inside this adapter (you can read about that HERE) I will just say that it steals a lot of light that would otherwise go into the lens. Long story short? Our 320 ISO camera becomes a 160 ISO camera.
This isn’t always a problem, but it does have to be taken into account ALL of the time. The amount of light needed to get proper exposure is exponentially increased compared to a faster camera. By the way, “faster” in this case means more sensitive to light, “higher ISO” if you will. It’s a constant battle. Bigger lights take more power, and cost more money. In the case of this shoot, we took advantage of using HMI lighting. HMI lights are about 5 times more efficient per-watt than tungsten lights. So, our little 575 watt PAR really pumps out a lot of light for not much power draw- very important when filming at a practical location without the luxury of a big generator.
Please stay tuned for more screen grabs and technical discussions of the scenes!
