Some lighting notes from In My Image

[Scottness]

David Rusanow - the DOP on In My Image - has written this description of the lighting for the film. David has only limited internet access at the moment so he's given this to me on a disc to put in, but he will be able to read these posts intermittantly so feel free to direct any questions to him here - he just might not be able to answer them for a week or so.

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Lighting "In My Image" part 1

To start with there are several things I should point out about the production and the equipment I had at my disposal. Scot (the Director) wanted the lighting to be very natural and coming from obvious sources, so for 1930's Papua New Guinea this meant natural sun/moonlight and candle/oil sources. This meant a lot of amber candlelight, hot daylight, and blue moonlight (which had a touch of green). We were shooting on Tungsten balanced Kodachrome colour reversal which had a very tight ASA reading of 40 in Tungsten and 25 in daylight. Taking into account my lighting equipment consisted of three red heads a 2K a 250 w household flood a series of home made reflectors boards and the odd C - Stand, f2.4 was a very popular f-stop on the lens.
The film being its most sensitive under tungsten lighting I generally tried to light interiors with tungsten balanced lamps only. The low ASA in Daylight was actually helpful as we had no ND filters for the camera and were mainly shooting in very bright sunlight.
Nighttime exteriors where a very touchy situation as the only light I had with reasonable punch was the 2k, and even that needed to be quite close to the background to get close to a reading. The night exteriors where mainly lit with amber candle/oil light and complemented with blue green moonlight. Most of the night scenes fell off to darkness in the backgrounds due to most of it being shot in Scot's backyard and other tight locations.
The Daylight Interiors where lit from obvious window sources, this usually involved the 2K through a window trying to compete with the sun. Inside I used the redheads to fill in the opposite side and if justified a little bit of backlight, the remaining redhead was generally used to light the background.
Daylight exteriors where usually filled in with our homemade reflectors, these where only really useful close up. A lot of the daylight exteriors was shot as is, for that real natural look (there's no backlight on a bright sunny day!), check out the beach scene with David and Stu that was shot at sunset with only one reflector to add an overall fill. http://www.users.bigpond.com/scotandjenny/fre.jpg http://www.users.bigpond.com/scotandjenny/fire2.jpg

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--- Two things David forget to mention, of a more general nature, is that there was no flat front on lighting and virtually no instance of light bounced off the roof to give an overall fill or ambience. In the second instance bouncing the light off the roof would give almost a three dimensional version of the front on lighting - in that it would be a fairly uniform light distributed evenly in the space, without much variation. The only instance that I can reacall that we did this was in the vestry scenes which was shot in a very small store room with no window or natural light - light was bounced off the roof to give some fill, but more direct lighting was applied over it to shape the space.

The other point worth mentioning is that we were aware of the the exposure lattitude of the stock - ie one stop over and one stop under your set level - and the rest burning out or falling to black. All the scenes were metered with a handheld meter and the various levels of what was in focus, and surrounding it gauged and adjusted if necessary. I know David went to some trouble to make sure in dark scenes that what wasn't needed (and we didn't have enough light for!) definately fell to black, and wasn't caught in in some grey and grainy half light. Overall this worked quite well, there are some grainy scenes, but not many. Off the top of my head I can't remember which scenes they are, so can't provide too much information there.

We also had the use on one weekend of a 650watt theatre profile light, which was great with it's hard edge and focussable beam - it was used to replicate light through a window with branches in front of it too - there's a photo on one of the behind the scenes pages(http://www.mango-a-gogo.com/inmyimage/photos1.htm)

Hope all of this helps - one problem I know we had, which will come into play when editing is that some scenes were shot over different days and the light levels won't cut seemlessly! - and in some scenes where we shot till too late in the day (my fault!) the lit areas are more noticeable, with the lower natural light levels -- all something we're going to have to try and deal with in post - but a good lesson to learn.

Also (and I might be wrong David will answer this properly) I don't think we allowed for the loss of light in the lense (one stop I think) which would also account for the darker sometimes underexposed look as well -- but I might be wrong so don't take that yet!



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[Scottness]

One other thing I forgot to mention is that the ambient daylight levels in Australia are quite high - particualrly where we filmed this - South East Queensland. This will effect not only the daylight shooting, but also the ambient light levels indoors (though there is a colour correction issue there). I know alot of people who read this are from the USA and I've never been there but I have been to Britain, Ireland, France and Germany and it's alot brighter than these places and I imagine similar lattitudes elsewhere are the same. It might seem like a little thing but when you're working with only 25 ASA it can make a big difference. The only other light I've seen that seems similar (and I haven't been there, but our cameraman is originally from there and agrees) is Africa. I guess we're just lucky from the Super 8 perspctive - it's a different colour too - I think it's actually more mauve in the northern hemisphere! (Just seems that way! this is not a scientific assessment!) But at any rate the extra light levels I think helped us alot too. The shot of me and Joseph on the balcony is a good example of this
- that was undercover just with alot of really nice natural light coming in http://www.users.bigpond.com/scotandjenny/balcony1.jpg


Scot M

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[Alex]

Could you review what camera you shot with....did you ever use multiple cameras...and how you dealt with booming the sound.

Although these aren't lighting questions, it does help us visualize how you dealt with camera positioning as it related to sound and therefore lighting.

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Alex

[Scottness]

Hi ALex - yeah the camera was a Beaulieu 4008 ZMII -- I would have loved to have shot with multiple cameras but just couldn't afford it - especially since they would both have to be crystal synched - and I wouldn't have liked to have used a different camera either - so as to maintain the same image quality (I'd use another type of high quality camera - but as long as they were both that type) - and as far as I recall David was quite keen on making sound go last! much to the chagrin of whoever was on boom that day - so they always had to work around his lighting set up - there may have been exceptions but he could answer that (one of thedraw backs of acting and directing - you're not aware of everything that a director normally would be!)

Scot M

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