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.

The brief was for a very bright, punchy cinematic look, and it seemed like another good opportunity to get the RED camera on board. ¬†It was the first RED experience for the producer and director. ¬†Kit came from Shoot HD, who’ve put together an absolutely cracking package with all the extra bits and pieces that make a huge difference on set. ¬†The kit included a set of 6 Ultra Primes – my first go with these lenses – and amongst other toys, an IDX CamWave wireless HD-SDI link which meant the 17″ Panasonic director/client monitor was physically disconnected from the camera, making moving stuff around a huge amount easier, but benefiting from an uncompressed HD-SDI signal with no noticeable delay.

The Shoot HD kit also came beautifully flightcased, which makes a massive difference to the camera assistants’ quality of life and instantly lets you know that it’s all going to have been extremely well looked after.

As usual I rated the camera at ISO250 for a slightly cleaner image, and used Tiffen IR-cut NDs and a polariser in front of the lens to give a stop for everything of T/2.0 on this extremely sunny day.

For the exteriors I used a couple of 4×4′ frames with half white diffusion to take the edge off the very harsh sun working as a backlight (if you look in the reflection of the car windows you can actually see them – would have been much better to use a single 12×12′ but would have required more crew to rig), and then a 4×4′ silver reflected to bounce the sun back in as an edge light for the closeups.

For the interiors the director was after the feeling of morning sun streaming through the windows, so we used a little fine haze in the air to give the light a touch of volume, and lower the contrast of the scene. ¬†Supplementing the sun (we’d scheduled the shot using my Helios sun calculator to make sure the sun was at the most advantageous position for this scene) were two 2.5KW HMIs with 1/4 CTO to warm them slightly. ¬†All the strong directional light you can see on the back cupboards if from the HMIs. ¬†The sun was coming from a much more acute angle and we had to put in a few nets to take down the hot spots on the windowsill. ¬†Ideally, we’d have boxed out the whole window from the sun, leaving just one side clear where you can see the other house, and just used the HMIs to create the sunlight so we’d have more control, but again it would have taken longer than we had.

For the closeups I put a 4×4′ KinoFlo with daylight tubes and full white diffusion just out of frame. ¬†To hold the detail outside the window I had several stops of ND in and the polariser too to pop the blue skies a little so any artificial light that was to make any difference at all had to basically be on top of the actress.

For the scene at the door, I hid a 1.2 KW HMI inside the hallway to suggest light from the kitchen in the rear backlighting her hair, then bounced a 2.5KW HMI from the kitchen floor up into the kitchen ceiling to brighten up the back of the shot. ¬†For his shot, we faked the same 3/4 backlight the sun had been giving us in the wide shot (which was done at a different location) using a 2.5K and a 4×4 reflector. ¬†For both shots the ‘key’ light on the actors’ faces was just the natural bounce at the location.

DIT Tom Mitchell had brought in a full DIT kit from 4K London and was able to cut together a rough version of the ad before we’d barely begun packing up – nice bit of proof for anyone who claims RED takes longer than any other format!

The offline was cut using ProRes files debayered at quarter res to 1024 x 576px, then colourist Simox Cox at Fullrange Films went back to the original r3d raw files in Color for the final grade, which is where the pictures above come from.

Thanks to Tom, we also got some DoP Diary cam stuff going!

And not only *that*, we even took loads of behind the scene stills…

Really cool shoot today for Chips Away, produced by Koala TV. Got tons of photos, DoP Diary Cam stuff and thoughts so will do a big blog post soon.

Now off for a two day steadicam job. See you soon!

UPDATE: blog post now up.

I would normally just put random YouTube videos in the regular web picks dumps, but this one made me choke on my beer it was so good…

Unless you have a huge budget for serious HMI firepower, shooting day exteriors means you have one lighting unit only – the sun. ¬†And whilst you can’t control where and when it’s going to appear, you can calculate both of those and use that information to your advantage. ¬†A sun position calculator draws on a heady yet ultimately simple bunch of celestial mechanics to figure out the path of the sun through the sky at any given point on the Earth, for any given time.

Using that knowledge, you can perform all sorts of tricks, from the simple to the incredibly helpful:

• Work out sunrise and sunset times for anywhere on the planet on any date
• Work out exactly what compass bearing the sunrise will appear at, for those glorious long lens African savannah shots
• Work out how long the shadow of any given object will be at any time of day
• If your shooting location is surrounded by tall objects like buildings or trees, work out – months or years in advance of the shoot if necessary – the precise time when the sun will clear the top of a building that’s 55 degrees above the horizon from where your subject’s going to be standing

It’s a tool any DoP, gaffer or professional stills photographer needs to have in their arsenal. And thanks to the iPhone, we have a perfect mobile computing platform for the job, and thankfully the guys at Chemical Wedding have stepped up.

Helios Sun Position Calculator at ¬£17.99 joins pCam (the film calculations package, review coming soon) at ¬£23.99 in the category of “unsually expensive iPhone applications”, and that is going to be the first thing that hits any prospective customer seeing as Apple, in their wisdom, don’t allow demo versions of software in the App Store.

If you can get over the sticker shock – and I’m speaking here to an audience of film industry professionals – let’s not forget that we wouldn’t think twice paying the same amount ordering a few extra brackets or clamps or something in a lighting rental package if we thought they were going to help out on a shoot. ¬†And that would be per day – ¬£17.99 gets you Helios forever.

The market leader before Helios is probably sunPATH, at $99 (¬£61), a venerable desktop Mac or PC tool that does the calculation side of things, spitting out PDF charts, combined with a Suunto compass/inclinometer for actually being able to point at the spot where the sun’s going to appear.

With the exception of the compass (and more on that issue later), Helios loaded onto a iPhone replaces both these tools with ease.

The main screen of the application lets you select a date and location easily, and I liked that there’s a single button to press under each selection to preset the date or time to ‘today/now.’ ¬†For location, you can either get Helios to use your iPhone’s GPS to find your location, which works very quickly presumably because the location accuracy required is the level that the iPhone gets pretty much¬†instantaneously¬†off cell tower triangulation, rather than having to locate the GPS satellites. ¬†And if you don’t happen to be at wherever you’re calculating for, there’s a database of major cities around the world, or you can enter lat/long co-ordinates.

Once that’s done, the main screen, shown above, gives a compass display showing the sun’s bearing at the time, date and location you’ve chosen. ¬†The whole compass ring can be rotated with your finger (this is actually really cool, because if you set the time, date and location to where you’re at, and rotate the ring so the sun icon is pointing towards the sun in real life, you’ve just made yourself a little impromptu compass!), or you can drag the sun icon itself to different compass bearings and the time shown will update to show you what time it would be when the sun is at the bearing you’ve chosen.

Of course, bearing is only one part of the puzzle. ¬†On the far left of screen, Helios gives you the inclination of the sun in degrees above the horizon, and perpendicular to this is a black bar showing shadow length as a result (really just the other side of a right angle triangle, of course). ¬†The end of the shadow bar gives you the ‘shadow ratio’, so if it’s saying 1.2 you know an object 1 meter high would cast a shadow 1.2m long at the time you’ve set Helios to.

The second display mode of Helios is SkyView, showing the track of the sun across the sky with the centre of the diagram being directly above your head and the red circle around the outside being the horizon. ¬†In testing I found this a really useful way of gauging how ‘toppy’ or ‘sidey’ the sun was going to be during say the mid-morning, when looking at different shoot dates a month apart.

The final display, calling on the iPhone’s built in accelerometer, is the¬†inclinometer. ¬†After a short calibration procedure which I found slightly confusingly described, the display gives you a black¬†artificial¬†horizon. ¬†You can then ‘sight’ along the long edge of your iPhone at an object above the horizon and read off the angle to it from the screen. ¬†The developers haven’t missed a trick by pulling in the data from the other displays into this screen, so based on the location and date you’ve set, the inclinometer shows the two times and compass bearings during the day that the sun will be found at that angle. ¬†This is very useful for working out when the sun will clear tall obstructions around your location, whether so you can shoot in bright sunlight, or so you can avoid it. ¬†It’s probably not the world’ most accurate tool – you don’t want to go surveying with this thing – but the accuracy is well within the requirements of the job in hand.

Working with Helios just as I walked around town today, thinking about the sort of questions I’d have if on a location scout or shoot, I found myself reaching for my iPhone and finding an accurate answer when before I’d have just guesstimated the sun position for a certain time of day. ¬†The attractive design and well thought-out menu structure only make it less of a barrier to get the thing out of your pocket in the first place.

There’s a lot of rumours flying around that the next hardware update to the iPhone, likely to be announced in the next few weeks, will contain a magnetic compass to help improve the GPS and enable turn-by-turn directions, as well as being accessible by third party apps. ¬†I’m sure the second Chemical Wedding get their teeth into the compass APIs they will have that integrated into the app, which would take it up to a full five star rating for me. ¬†At the moment, you still need to carry around a trusty Silva compass. ¬†But with the compass integrated into the iPhone, you can easily imagine a mode where you just point the phone anywhere on its own and it reads out what time of day the sun would be closest to where you’re pointing… or even, if you wanted the sun at a very precise point for some reason, what date you should come back on to achieve that.

One suggestion I came up with that could improve it would be integrating a simple weather report for the location and date given and superimposing some sort of graphics onto the compass wheel on the main screen, so as you drag the sun around the compass you can see times of day where it might be behind cloud, rain etc.

Other than that – this app will more than pay for itself the first time you use it for a day’s exterior work. ¬†I look forward to more film software from Chemical Wedding.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars