[Rick Wise]

Great description, Todd. And you are lucky to have the same crew for ten years. That speaks volumes about your choices and also how you lead the pack.

I’m afraid I haven’t had a full-up shoot such as I described for at least three years. On the most recent shoot (just this week, three commercials in two days,) I had one gaffer/grip with one large LED light on a pole and another small one for car interiors that went right on the camera. Mostly hand held or else on sticks. No monitor at all. Oh but we did have a “dolly”: a wheel chair. Shot with the Canon EOS c300, which I like and in some ways don’t like for this quick style shooting. And I had an AC to wrangle data and lug stuff around, and a sound guy to both boom and run radio mics. Each one terrific. I miss the great full-ups but you make what you can get as great as possible!

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Rick Wise]

Any tips on the order you use to achieve the look you are after? Do you, for example, start with x number of lights and then play with or turn off one at a time, or do you add lights after setting up the key? I know there are no hard and fast rules but just trying to develop some basic practices. I often find less is more.

The number of lights we have depends on: the budget, the space(s) we are lighting, the look we are after. In general, I tell the gaffer the look I want, where the key should be, what kind of key (hard/soft/other) and then leave it to him/her to make it work. A good gaffer will set his crew to setting up multiple lights. Once the gaffer is mostly pleased I’ll take a careful look and may make changes.

After finding the look you want are there any tricks to not having a boom pole kill your design? It’s not always easy to get the mike within 3 feet of the subject’s mouth and not have it throw an unwanted shadow, even with the talent as far as possible from the b.g. It’s sometimes easier to just go with a lav even if a hypercardoid has better sound. When you start adding flags do you find it changes your design dramatically or does hiding flaws get easier with experience?

I work closely with sound, and try to not trap them. A hard key from one side may work just fine if the boom person can come in from the other and miss that light, probably helped by a judicious flag or two set by the grips. Soft keys are easier to handle for boom shadow, though harder to flag correctly. Sometimes sound will have to work with radio lavs instead of a boom because the shot is so wide and high. Yes, placing flags effectively gets easier with experience, like everything else about lighting. Having a great, experienced crew is a joy for the DP.

When you are setting up, do you have more than one monitor in use so that the camera operator and crew member adjusting a light can see the results as they change its height, angle, distance?

How many monitors depends a lot on the budget and also the circumstances of the shoot. I try to get a color-critical monitor by the camera, another for the director, and then a separate video village for the DIT. Sometimes we have to make do with just one monitor shared by all. I also work at seeing by eye what the results are without looking at the monitor. Part of the fun.

Since all this takes time, do you find it easier to use stand-ins for your talent so they don’t get anxious? I think it would be better for the talent to come into a set that has been fixed and then only have to sit through slight adjustments and a mike check than all the experimenting it takes to get the lighting and camera angles correct. Also I don’t always want the talent seeing themselves on the monitors and if the monitor is facing the lighting crew then talent can see them selves.

Another budget question. The more expensive the shoot, the more expensive the talent, the more likely production will provide stand ins. Of course it’s easier to work with the real actors, but totally boring for them, so whenever possible I try to work with stand ins. As for the talent seeing themselves, I always place my monitor facing the camera, not the talent. The director’s monitor will likely be also set where talent does not see itself.

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Rick Wise]

Good catch, Dennis. The key is a chimera. After that, it’s all about placement. Myself I would have lifted that light to about 45º above the horizontal. Here the key is at the same height as the face. None of this really matters a whole lot since Errol Morris is a master at interviewing subjects and getting them to spill their guts. It almost doesn’t matter what they look like, though we of the camera persuasion always prefer a stunning image.

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Rick Wise]

It’s all about where you place the key light, how much fill you use (in this case none or almost none) and how you light the background. Try moving the key light (your main light) around until you get this look. Then decide on how hard or soft you want it to be (add diffusion to make the shadows softer — in this interview the nose shadow is fairly soft) and then treat the background. In addition, we usually add a small amount of backlight, though here I think there is none. Not needed as the background is rather hot.

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Rick Wise]

It sounds to me like you have pretty well figured this out. Yes, I’ve shot lots of hallways with light coming from open doors combined with overhead fluorescents. The first thing I’d recommend is to go and visit both locations to see what is actually there. Don’t rely on reports from people on the site. You need to place your eyeballs on location.

You will also need to deal with color: are the overheads cool or warm fluorescents? All commercial/residential fluorescents emit a green spike. You may want to add some plus green to your lights, and if the overheads are cool (daylights) then roughly 1/2 blue to your tungsten lights, so that your lights roughly match the color of the hall lights both on the red-blue axis and the magenta-green. Then white balance in that light, if you are shooting video.

You can diffuse your open-door lights or make them hard. Look at the hard version and see if you like it.

Finally, for the areas of the hall between the open doors, you may or may not want some frontal (light) fill.

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Rick Wise]

One thing to keep in mind: you do NOT need or even want to match the intensity of the light outside. If you were to do so, the show shots would look fake, a stage setting improperly lit. It looks more “real” for the outside to be around 2 stops hotter than the inside. That leaves some detail out the windows.

I don’t see why you need battery power, unless the juice has been cut off to these houses.

If there are white ceilings, you could bounce a joker or two into them to bring up the ambient light enough for a more acceptable balance. Any other solution, such as chimeras or umbrellas, is likely to prove too directional. There are also other tricks, such as putting shower curtain on an off-screen window through which sunlight pours — works best early or late in the day when the angle of the sun is low. If there are off-screen windows you can also blast your jokers through shower curtain (I’m a big fan of Vinylite, which may no longer be available) from an off-screen doorway or window. 1000H (tracing paper) is a beautiful diffuser, but does chew up a lot of light.

The more dramatic solutions such as a hard HMI through a window or door don’t work so well for what you need here.

If you don’t move the camera, you could take one shot exposed for the interior, then another with a heavy ND filter to expose for the outside, and marry the pixs in post — a lot of work. (Don’t change the iris as that will effect depth of field and make cutting out the windows more difficult.) But in any case, these video tours want movement. Your competition is no doubt using stills and then in post doing pans and zooms for a really bad “video” tour.

Likely you will find no single solution to your shots.

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Rick Wise]

Blain Brown’s Cinematography, new edition. Also Brown’s Lighting book. Some of my students prefer Cinematography, 3rd edition, by Kris Malkiewicz.

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Rick Wise]

Remember, this is the view of a heretic. Once upon a time they burned us at the stake.

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Rick Wise]

Indeed, the holy grail has been for a long time that 24 frames is more filmic than 30 frames. I am of the heretical view that such is not so. There is only one time when it’s really important to shoot 24p: when the video is going to be transferred to film for theatrical distribution. Transferring 24 to 24 works way better than 30 to 24.

The look of 24p video is not the look of 24-frame film. Some of us think that actually 30P looks more like 24-frame film than 24p. The reason: 24p video introduces some artifacts that film does not.

You will also find that pans and tilts will look smoother shot 30p than 24p.

So fear not. You are not alone in the world. Go for your 30p and make great movies! (Just don’t plan on them become actual film to be shown in theaters.)

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Rick Wise]

Likely that iPhone was shot live. Using a turntable. Possibly a small support to lift the phone off the surface that is rotoscoped out in post. Otherwise, on a white surface that matches the white background. The object has to be centered exactly, otherwise it will swing around the screen and not just rotate on itself. This is not easy to do. You need a professional turntable (props/rental house) which allows you to adjust the speed exactly as you want it.

Pulling off the perfect camera move is also no easy task. It is possible this was shot with high enough resolution that the entire pull was done in post. But I think it was shot live all the way.

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com