Lighting set-up for Geico-style Commercial

[John Sharaf]

Late to the party here, but a very good and practical chain.

Two things to add to the conversation is the Dynamic Range of the camera you’re using and the feasibility and skill in Color Correction.

The best of the new modern cameras really excel in conditions like these; namely sunny day exteriors where inevitable “hot” zones (like the sky or the street or the sunlight screaming off a white building, etc) impinge on your otherwise beautiful back-lit actor. Shooting in Log (or better in RAW) will preserve the greatest dynamic range (DR) which in the case of an Alexa is 14 stops (at nominal 800 ASA), I believe the C300 that Todd uses come close.

You have to be careful to shoot at the camera’s “native” speed, which is actually determined by an equal number of stops above and below middle gray (in the case of a 14 stop range, that’s seven above and seven below). If you go to 400ASA on the Alexa for example you now only have 6 stops above and eight below, and so forth; so to get the lens wide open for pretty, soft backgrounds and bokeh, you must use other techniques like ND filters and/or shutter speed. These filters can be pretty deep (like 1.8 or 2.1) in full sun conditions, so you must be aware of infra red (IR) pollution and use IRND’s or Hot Mirrors as required by the particular camera system.

Then of course you take your Log images into color correction and giggle everything around. One of the most powerful things you can do is raise the gamma, which essentially is the same as putting light into the shadow side of the face. The caution here is that as you do that, the overall color becomes de-saturated, so now you have to boost the saturation. If you’re inter-cutting to front-lit scenes now you have to “match” the color sat shot to shot. Kind of a house of cards!

None of this precludes the advantage of lighting the scene to the preferred ratio from the start, but as the chain so clearly points out, you might not have the budget for the proper kit and manpower, or even if you do, you might not have the time to work it all.

JS