Well, it seems it’s been about two years since I last properly posted something on this blog and the entries below seem like a *long* time ago! Time for something a bit more current.

I’ve just wrapped a fun week of shooting for the Birmingham School of Acting who each year shoot a series of extracts from existing films, TV shows and plays with their final year students taking all the roles to showcase their performing abilities.  The final DVD acts as a calling card for the actors, and also gets screened at an event at the Ivy for prospective agents.

For me as a cinematographer it offers a yearly (this is my second year shooting it) opportunity to experiment in a fairly low-stress environment with some new styles that I might not get the chance to try on my mainstream projects.

You can see a few extracts from the pieces I did last year on my main site at edmooredop.com.  For this year I wanted to be much bolder in stylizing each scene, and as it’s unlikely this material will ever have the chance to be graded, I wanted to try and get the whole look in camera wherever possible.

For budgetary reasons this was shot on my own Canon 5D with just two lenses: the 24-70 f/2.8 and 70-200 f/2.8 IS. I pulled my own focus whilst operating and acted as my own gaffer with a fantastic amount of help from my assistant Jay Somerville and the stage management students from Birmingham School of Acting.

Almost everything was shot at ISO100-200 at f/2.8 with a few shots at f/4 where I just couldn’t nail the focus.  Mostly I focused by eye with no rehearsal from a Marshall 7″ monitor fed from a HDMI>SDI converter, but where this became difficult I just taped a few marks onto the lens barrel and this largely proved fairly repeatable. Having said that I *hate* working like this (i.e. without proper lens and a focus puller) as you have to work all your camera blocking around the limited ability you have to accurately pull focus.

It should be noted that the sharpness of the 70-200 (the mark II in this case) compared to the 24-70 was very noticable even on the SD image the 5D puts out in record, and wherever possible I used that lens for difficult focus pulls even if it meant the shot had to be filmed at a longer focal length. The image when in focus with the 70-200 just “popped” on the monitor a lot more identifiably than the shorter zoom.

For the most part I shot with a picture profile that was turned right down on contrast, sharpness and saturation. I’ve noted the exceptions below.

My lighting package consisted of:

  • Ancient 2.5K HMI fresnel
  • 2 x 650W tungsten fresnels
  • 2 x 1000W tungsten china balls
  • 1 x 300W tungsten fresnel
  • 2 x inline dimmers
  • 2 x 24″x36″ flags
  • 1 x 6′x6′ butterfly frame with full grid cloth
  • White/Silver lastolite
  • Various gels

So here’s a load of stills I’ve taken from the ProRes conversions of the native files off the camera. I’ll make lighting notes on each, always referring to the image below the text.

Note that this is a tiny cross-section of the huge number of scenes we shot; I’ve just picked the more visually striking ones.

I think a weird screen gamma thing has made these images display a little more crushed than I intended, but you’ll get the idea.

You can click the image to get the 1920×1080 version.

Scene 1 – this was a very seductive scene which I persuaded the director to let me set at night.  This whole project had a very limited locations budget so we had to find ways of using the school’s own facilities wherever possible. This was a conference room which fortunately for me had a floor-to-ceiling window about 3 meters wide down the middle of one wall. This let me place my HMI about 20′ outside the window to get a strong side or backlight whilst being far enough away to be fairly even from one side of the room to the other.

For this particular scene I gelled the HMI with peacock blue and added a warm fill (justified by a desk light I got props to place on the desk) which was a dimmed 650W bouncing off the white lastolite which was placed at a fairly low angle. The cyan/orange contrast was what I was after as it’s such a popular look in Hollywood stuff at the moment and whilst it’s usually applied in the grade I thought it would be fun to get in camera.

The peacock blue didn’t come out anything like it looked to my eye on camera but after a bit of fiddling with the white balance and color tone on the 5D I got something I liked.

One thing I particularly like in these shots is the beautiful circular eye light the lastolite gives us. I think we tend to think of lastolites as a very cheapo “TV news” type of kit but used creatively they can produce a gorgeous quality of light. The trick is to get them extremely close.

The walls and ceiling of this room were all bright white which is a massive pain but the only way on this budget to control that was to shoot at ISO 100 to kill as much ambient bounce as possible and try and keep the direct and specific light levels on the cast well up.

For this wider shot I added a dimmed 650 through the door panel to give her a modeling light. It helps that it’s coming from the same direction as the “desk light” (in reality we didn’t have a working bulb for the actual desk light so the light you see hitting the laptop etc is coming from my other dimmed 650 right at the top of its stand just off the right off frame, spotted right in and barn-doored off the actor).

This is a great one for the lovely eye light. I’m not totally wild about the blending between the two colors of light; a softer warm fill from just behind camera may have smoothed the transition but I didn’t have the kit nor the time. Incidentally she constantly leaned back and forth on this 135mm shot which when you look at the depth of field is easy to imagine as the nightmare it was!

Scene 2 – This was the exact same location but with two different actors playing the same characters (happened a lot over the shoot as a way of getting all the actors in the final year group a chance to perform). I swopped the peacock blue for Lee 101 yellow to give an over-the-top warm look. This scene is supposed to be set in the offices of a private security firm working in Iran so I was going for that sort of feel albeit with limited resources. There is some peacock blue on the back wall from a 650 through the door for some color contrast and an open white 650 flagged just onto the guy at the end of the table to pick him out as the HMI from the left hand window didn’t reach that far.  I let the yellow HMI light bounce off the opposing wall to fill her face.

These two closeups are lit solely with the HMI with Lee 101 gel and the natural bounce inside the room. I think her face was reading a stop under key with the yellow about 2 stops over. The highlights are a bit crunchy but hey, it’s only a 5D folks.

This was her eyeline to the guy at the end of the table. I could probably have done with getting a bit more light into her eyes for this but she was only on this line for a couple of short lines and I thought the shot had a certain raw quality I liked about it that was fine for a short period of screen time.

This shot is from later in the scene when the guy who was at the end of the table has now sat in the actress’ seat. It’s from roughly the same position as the shot immediately above, but I’ve tidied it up a bit and I think brought in a 4×4′ bit of poly bounce to lift the levels on his face.

It always feels very elegant to me to get both backlight and key from one source (with the help of a bounce). Sod fill. Fill light is for girls.

Scene 3 – this was for an extract from a play set in a Sixth Form college. In this scene two students who’ve recently hooked up meet after hours to talk about the experience. I hadn’t seen the location before; all I knew was “it’s a seminar room without any windows”. Didn’t sound good. When I got there it turned out it was right next to an identical room and the two were only separated by plate glass with integral venetian blinds.  Fortunately the second room was also free so I was able to put my HMI right at the other side of the second room blasting in through the venetian blinds, which were half -closed to produce a lovely shadow pattern across “our” room.

I gelled the HMI with a medium blue theatrical gel (forget the number) and balanced the camera to tungsten for an extreme blue look. I also modified the blocking so the actors would be on the row of desks immediately adjacent to the blinds so the shadows that fell on them would be at their hardest.

For the closeups I just added a little bounce fill from the lastolite. I love the pattern of highlights on her hair in this shot caused by the venetian blinds.

The director seemed to love the look so I “got away” :) with not filling this profile two-shot at all – the light on her face is coming direct from the HMI in the opposite room (left of frame) and there’s a lastolite, silver side in, just off camera right upstage of her bouncing a bit of HMI light back into his face to give a tiny bit of definition. This shot becomes a great kiss moment.

Never be afraid to let one side of a face fall completely off. Was really pleased with the shadows on her face here. I also think the shot only works well because of the light falling on the background wall on frame left. This is because I was lighting the whole space rather than just the actor. If you cover over that bit of background light detail with your hand the shot becomes much less interesting. With that detail in place, it sells the whole look – a look that is admittedly stylised.

For the reverse of the shot above I had to move the HMI to the other end of the adjacent room so we’d get some patterns on the wall behind his head. I felt he was the more mysterious character in this scene (she is much more open), so it felt natural that I let his face fall off even more into darkness.

Scene 4 – we shot tons of stuff from Holby City in this one drama studio and to be honest the only way to keep myself sane was to light every single scene completely differently even if it was in the exact same “set”. For this scene in the three shots below I went for a very low key night time look. I put a 4×4 poly board at the back of shot angled at 45 degrees down back into the scene (you can see the C-stand holding the poly cunningly designed as a drip stand) with my HMI bouncing into it from just behind camera. I added a bottomer flag to cut any spill from the HMI onto the scene directly.  This was a very sad scene about a failed pregnancy so for me this mood worked well for the script.

For the coverage I was persuaded by the director to put a little more light into their faces (compared to what we’d established in the wide) so I pulled the poly bounce further round towards camera and a lot lower to get a bit of light under their brows. I tried to keep it roughly in keeping with the wide so the cut will work though.

Scene 5 – this was a good example of choosing your battles. The production dept had set us up with someone’s flat to shoot this scene from The Devil Wears Prada.  After a quick look at the location the director and I chose instead to shoot it on the fire escape balcony out the back and take advantage of the lovely late afternoon sun.  I think this scene now jumps off the screen with a richness that would have been impossible to achieve in a dingy kitchen, and the visible cityscape should allow some great opportunities for the sound designer to add some fantastic atmos tracks.

And now a few random shots…

The below three shots were all keyed with a dimmed 1000W china ball through a 59p IKEA lampshade. It’s a beautiful, dare I say unique quality of light that I think looks amazing on skin tones and is extremely cheap to boot.

In this one you can see the nice circular eyelight the china ball provides.

Here’s a brigher shot that’s white balanced fairly conventionally (just to show I don’t always shoot weird looking stuff). This was keyed with a HMI bounce off a 4×4 poly left of camera about 5′ up. There was a dimmed 650W hairlight coming from one of the rows of shelves camera right.

This scene is set in a cafe in Jordan at breakfast time. To my eye the first bright rays of the sun at breakfast time (as opposed to dawn) always seem to be a bit erratic and often squint-inducingly bright as they creep over bit of architecture and through windows at weird angles. In an attempt to capture something of that feel I rigged the HMI some distance off camera right with a makeshift bit of cardboard I attacked with scissors to make a passable cucoloris to break up the beams of light. A column that was part of the location was used to “flag off” the light from his fact and a 4×4 poly bounce was placed off camera left to add a keylight back in. I was more than happy with the parts of this scene – like his elbow here – that totally blew out. That feels very “morning rays of light” to me.

And finally here’s a really simple shot in a very simple back corridor location that I was struggling to light until I thought of “grading” it in camera. I moved the 5D picture profile colour tone all the way into the green and played with the white balance and contract to produce this look right in camera which I think works great for the Jordan location.  The only lights used were the overhead practical fluroescents which I guess were a cool white at 4000K or so.

For this scene I took all the pan and tilt tension off the tripod and kept a bit of organic movement in my operating for a controlled, pseudo “handheld” feel.

Hope you’ve enjoyed all this – happy to answer any questions via the comments below or ideally, twitter – @edmoore.