Daytime Lighting - School corridor
 

Hi,

I need to light a busy corridor scene, 4 main characters plus around 20 extras.

I have access to 3 dedo lights, about a dozen redheads and a few work lights. The main characters will be moving around (steadicam)

Not sure how to go about this; the ambient light in the corridor isnt too bad, although i should probably close down to stop the ceiling lights from over exposing. Faces are still too dull and could benefit from something.

I've attached pics of the corridor im going to be using.

Any advice would be great

Tony

The ceiling lights don't look too bad in the photos. However, the problem with Steadicam shots is often hiding the lights and not getting Steadicam shadows. Looking at the photographs there doesn't seem to be that many places where you can conceal them.

Are the characters walking the length of the corridor?

If you are, one method would be to use a china ball on a boom, which will give a moving fill light on the faces. You can then try to hide lights on top of lockers, in doorways etc, to provide possible pools of light around your key action and small amounts of backlight. I suspect you'll need to put on some 216. Often, you also need your practicals to help with the lighting.

Usually it's best to block out your shot(s) and see where you can hide your lights.

You are lucky that the lockers have a shelf space on top where you can place some lights out of camera range. You also might be able to clip small lights to the drop ceiling. Of course you don't want all your light coming from above, but you can reinforce the ceiling lights from up there without worrying about them getting in all the shots. If you put the camera over to one side of the hall a bit, you can also put lights just around the corners in adjacent hallways and doorways to add a bit of backlight (light aimed at the back of your talent therefore pointed toward the camera).

In the rooms shining out as they walk the corridor makes for good practical lighting that you can control the height and direction of to get nice side lighting. China on boom for fill is a great idea.

Ah, the old Steadicam walk in talk in a school corridor--I'd hate to think how many of those I've shot! The way we usually tackle this is as most folks here have wisely said already: moving front fill (china ball is good, or a handheld Kino or equivalent) with pops coming through the doorways. The redheads will work well for this, but you might want to shoot them through a diffusion frame (not the same as clipping diffusion to the barndoors) so they are less "sourcey". A nice look is if the frame is set so that the diffused light plays across the faces, but the raw light hits them from chest down, which gives the feel of sunlight playing into the scene. Very common episodic TV look. Naturally you would want to pick one side of the corridor to represent the sunlit side.

I wouldn't recommend trying to hide lights around the lockers or up in the ceiling except for the very end of the walk, if the characters end up coming to a stop at a specific spot for a conversation. At that point you can add supplemental light as if you were lighting a static shot (don't overpower the look of the rest of the scene), i.e. your walking fill can fade off and be replaced by a stand-mounted fill. Hiding lights in the walking portion can be dicey as you will likely see them as you move down the corridor. Make sure to line up the final camera position to evaluate what you do and don't see.

The ceiling practicals are a bit unfortunate in that they protrude down, it's a lot easier to manage the type that are flushed up into the ceiling. You could minimize the pain by neatly wrapping the sides in black material (duvetyne), and if you can locate and borrow the honeycomb grids that are usually used with fluorescent fixtures in modern installations that can be taped over the bottom of these fixtures, that will further help the appearance of the light once they come into your shot (you won't see as much of the direct heat of the diffuser lens of the fixture). That's a pretty extensive job depending on how long your shot is and how sophisticated you care to get.

The very simplest thing you can do is add the moving fill to beef up the faces and let the rest go.

Careful design of the paths of the extras will help make those 20 bodies seem like more. Plenty of background and a few foreground crosses will keep things looking lively. 20 people is not enough to make those corridors look truly "busy" (that would take more like 50), but you can at least make it look populated.

The problem as I see it will be getting even lighting all down the corridor.

I guess the strip lighting is always going to blow out, but maybe if you ND the bottom surface of the diffusers it will help to reduce the downward light, but keep the side spill, which is giving the soft bounced light.
You could try tin foil in the diffuser to stop light coming out the bottom all together, just keep the side bounced light (I hope I'm explaining this well enough!!)

Or maybe that Lee silver sheet with holes in it. It acts as an ND of sorts, but will bounce some light back into the fixture and hopefully out the sides so it might not be so wasteful, but it's expensive.

If you place bounced redheads all along the corridor you'll see them in shot unless you are very well rehearsed and blocked out. Sometimes there will be space for lighting on the left side sometimes on the right of the corridor. It's bound to give uneven results. I would go with existing lighting, maybe buy better tubes if they have a low CRI, then add subtle fill near the action.

Instead of a china ball, you could simply handhold a redhead, carefully and with gloves, and bounce it off the ceiling above the camera as the shot happens. If it's not too overpowering.

At live events I get an assistant to hold a dedo running on 20w 12v with a lastolite diffuser in front of it. It's held on it's own stand above the camera to give a cameralight look, without looking to false or overpowering.

Charles, are you referring to having a greater distance between the lamp and the diffuser, or having more area for the diffuser, or both. I ask because on Lowell lights with their frames there is a slight, but no great difference berween using their frames and just clipping the diffusion to a barndoor.

I think Charles is referring to large diffuser frames, like lastolites. That's what I use infront of my dedo, albeit a small lastolite about 15 inches.

Actually I started writing my post and left it for an hour or so, and didn't read Charles post. Sorry. I've driven home from work and thought some more...

But I guess the question hasn't been asked - what look are you hoping to achieve?, what time of day will you be filming? (schools finish around 3.30 pm and it's dark at 4pm in the UK ATM)

Strong redhead sidelight suggesting light in the classrooms to the sides would actually give you the excuse for having further patches of redheads in the corridors maybe.

It is a typical very small English school corridor, not the kind of thing you see on the big screen very often. Probably no more than 8 foot wide.

thanks everyone for your replies.

I'll be filming on a sat morning, the scene takes place in early afternoon, say 2ish. The characters are going to walk about 1/3 maybe 1/2 way down the corridor.

would a dedo light with a softbox on a pole suffice as a moving fill? also with a moving fill how do i prevent the background people from looking unlit? is that where redheads in classrooms comes in?

corridor is pretty narrow and dark, not ideal i guess.

i looked at a couple of others but they were either lit by windows which would blow out or they were just really bright and evenly lit and made the video look flat. (im shooting HDV) any tips for making a bright location look less flat?

You seem worried about highlights in several of you posts. The fact is they will blowout. But so what I say.

I don't have a problem with window exteriors being blown out, so long as the exposure on the subject is OK and the light doesn't bloom around the subject.

You could always ND the windows of course. I'd use the corridor with the windows, the striplight corridor looks awfully dingy and flouri lighting often has a green cast.

The Dedo with diffuser will work as a moving soft fill, I've never seen a china ball in the flesh, and it's not in you kit anyway. How to keep the background lighting right is up to you.

Basically put redheads wherever you can to get the best look. It's a bit difficult to answer without being there too. Where are you actually shooting?

Maybe someone on here is free to help you out.

Tony:

If a corridor you have access to has windows down one side and it will not be in direct sun when you are planning to shoot there, that will give you the easiest and prettiest light to work in. If you prefer a more moody look, the corridor you showed in the pictures is perfectly workable with the recommendations given above.

The Dedo/softbox combo is perfectly usable as a front fill, as long as you have enough punch for the distance from the actors that you will be working. As far as the actors looking more lit than the background, it's all about ratios--you want just enough fill level to bring up the faces to a comfortable level, but not so much that the source is apparent. You are essentially filling in the dark areas between practicals with your front fill, and giving a highlight to the eyes. Usually I don't even bother with a pole, the fill can be handheld just behind and above the Steadicam.

Most modern fluorescents won't exhibit too much of a green cast on video, but they may have a difference color temperature (cooler/warmer) than tungsten so having an assortment of CTO and CTB is advised. If not possible, simply balance to your tungsten units and let the background be a little funky, it shouldn't look too bad.

Eric:

I was indeed referring to large frames set apart from the lights. I would use 4x4 frames with medium diffusion (light grid or 250 or equivalent) set back a few feet from the doorway, just so that they aren't visible to camera, to give the greatest spread. The redheads would be positioned about six feet further back to fill the frame. If the look was too punchy, you could add a little diffusion to the unit itself, which will knock it down and soften the overall effect even more (for closeups I use a second frame a few feet inside the first). If this level of grip equipment is not available, one can substitute shower curtain or translucent dropcloth hanging off a boom stand etc.

The Lowel frames are a little perplexing when used with units like the Omnis that have their own barn doors--they make a bit more sense if one was to use them with a Tota or V-light, which are need more distance from the bulb than the clamshell design allows when directly mounting diffusion.

If you're using CTB on the redheads, if need be, you can always double up on the lights going the diffusion frames.

There's not that much grunt from a blued up redhead going through diffusion. Although, you might just get enough depending on the sensitivity of your camera and the distances from the subject.

I wasn't recommending full CTB--even if this was simulating daylight, you wouldn't want it noticeably cooler than the overheads. If the flo's were cool whites, it might be worth adding some 1/4 CTB to the redheads. Won't affect the output much.

Charles, thanks for your reply. I've benefitted from your posts before and always appreciate yur input.

Tony, I had an odd thought- if you do use lights from the side doors, via diffusion frames, you could easily catch them in your frame if your camera is set at a wide angle, which it probably would be. That means you would have to back up the silks/frames from the doorway a bit. And if you are angling them a bit 'forward', i.e., in the same direction as the camera is moving, you would have to make sure which way the door swings, so you actually have space to back up both the frame and the instrument. Also, you might have to flag the light to keep it from reflecting off the face of the door.

OTOH, all this might be totally unecessary bother...the camera frame might pass by the doorways in such a way that it doesn't see any of this.

Eric, that is all part of the design when using this scheme. The frames are set first so that they are as far forward as possible but not visible to the camera as it pulls backwards. It can be useful to rotate them slightly so that they are facing more towards the talent than flat to the doorframe (this may be what you are saying, I'm not sure). The best way to slow down whatever downstream doorframes are affected would be a baffle in front of the frame (at a certain point the whole affair would be best served with a Chimera or Kino with their own baffles) rather than a flag, as it takes a lot of extension to work a soft source and the whole thing would have to back up further into the room, which then makes the flagging even harder, and so on.

I've been trying to find a representative version of what I've recommended but I don't have any of that stuff online, except this music video. The green hallway shots of the band were obviously not meant to be realistic but I used a pretty similar setup, with an LED ring light on the camera and HMI's shooting out the doorways (no diffusion, but cut with flags to hit the bodies not the faces). Like I said, not a great example but maybe it will help somehow.

I was wondering. Only reason to use the full CTB would be if there was natural daylight coming in.

If you angle the camera straight down the hallway (as in both sample pix top of thread) you will see the doors on both sides, if you put your vanishing point on one side of the frame instead of in the center, you'll change your angle of attack to one side of the hallway. If you light from that side, you can effectively do whatever you want in those rooms, hiding frames etc, without sacrificing the cool frame...it'll also give a nice solid background behind your subjects as they stand more in front of a wall rather than being separated by a vanishing point. This is of course all story dependent though.

What Cole said is what I was trying to explain. It can be challenging on a low budget and little time to set up the lights just as you like. If you can light mostly from one side, you reduce the time needed. If the doorways on that side don't show up as much in the shot, you won't need to worry about flagging the light to keep it from blowing out the doors or the doorframes.

Cole, Marcus. Good points. And after looking at the clip Charles was referring to, where there is spill on the doorway frame, I realized I was getting awfully 'fussy' in my thinking anyway. There's nothing wrong with what in the end is actually motivated light reflecting off the door sill or door itself for that matter.

BTW, Charles, is that you swinging the steadicam around its post?

This is the other corridor i can use, any comments on this one?

Very different corridor, you should pick the location that best suits the mood of your scene.

In this case you have daylight coming through the windows. Are these south facing, so that you have direct sunlight coming in?

The glass doors at the far could cause problems with reflections from your fill light and possibly the crew if you're filming at the far end.

Given you're dealing with daylight here, perhaps the easiest way is to go with it and using the light coming in from the windows. Although you could colour correct the windows by filtering them to covert their light to tungsten, however, I suspect it would be easier to just use CTB on your redheads and use the method from the previous corridor to light the far end.

You can use the moving fill on the faces so that they don't go too dark between the windows. Leaving the glass door at the far end open would avoid reflections.

Just for what it's worth, this corridor doesn't feel as much like a "real" school to me as the other one does.

yeah it is a pretty different corridor,; the film is a light hearted teenage romance, the windows are north facing.

both locations are in a college, i havent found the perfect corridor though but i can shoot there for free.

uh yeah. Zach shot most of the black and white Super 8 footage himself (as can be seen in a couple of shots) and he told me to "do something flashy" with the rig. I didn't do the Steadicam on the actual music video though, was too busy being a DP that day. We shot that whole video in a 10 hr day, which including two different cranes (one being the 100 ft Strada, what an amazing device) and 4 locations...jeez.

Back to the hallway--there shouldn't be any reason to have to avoid shooting straight down the pipe, having to rake into the side wall will lose a lot of depth of the shot (although it might help make it look busier, as you can re-use the extras by having them double back behind camera). Plus the lighting that you would be doing through the off-camera side doorways would start to flatten out a bit as you come around (it's no longer true side lighting). It might seem "easy" to slide sideways to line up the shot with the end of the hall just on the trailing edge of the frame, which will keep out the other side, but with a Steadicam shot and two characters walking, any deviation in their speed becomes harder to compensate for. For instance, you've lined up this raking shot of the two guys walking that favors the right wall of the corridor (also realize this will place one of them into semi-profile); if either the operator speeds up or the subjects slow down even a little, they will slide to the left side of the frame. The natural tendency here will be to pan left, which will instantly reveal the left side of the corridor. The better solution is for the operator to slow down, but if he does not find the proper spot to speed back up the actors may then get ahead of him and start pushing the right side of the frame.

Bottom line is that it is tougher to pull off a shot that attempts to see one side and the end of a hallway than it is one that is raked hard into a wall (45 degrees) or straight down the hallway. And of those two, the one that looks straight down the hallway is more dynamic and interesting due to the depth, and it does not favor one actor over the other.

and this is the final corridor, its in a newer building. Again a different feel, lots of daylight from skylights.

not really sure which one would look best and be easiest to deal with.

any opinions on this one?

Looks like less issues with contrast in that corridor, although it's hard to tell if the skylights continue in the foreground and we don't know how long your walk and talk will run. If you can contain it all in the lit section, you are in good shape. You might still need daylight walking fill with the camera, which will be a bit tough with the instruments you have, but even if you don't have it the ambience is probably OK to do what you need to do, you'll just want to supplement a bit for closeups if you have them (even a white bouncecard held under the faces should cover you)

Seems to me as though time of day could be a rather large factor as well. If you have it narrowed down to a couple of sites, you might want to see, (if possible with a stand-in and video camera), if a certain time of day may give you more favorable conditions.

BTW, somewhat off-topic... I've been watching "Jericho", the British crime series and the cinematography for that show rocks.

Did another location scout and found another suitable corridor. what do you reckon on this one? It goes on a bit behind the camera and there is another stack of lockers to the left behind cam.

What do you think? I'm not sure what you are asking about anymore. Two things come to my mind right away.

As director, which corridor suits YOUR needs and eyes vis a vis the script? What looks like the school that your characters would inhabit? Also as director, what blocking/action takes place? Is having a locker jutting out good or will it just get in the way of the actors or camera op when they are walking?

As lighting cameraman, which corridor is the easiest to light? Or, which gives you the most opportunity to create a certain mood?

Given that it is a romantic comedy, and assuming you don't have a large budget or lots of experience, the corridor with the skylight, especially at a time of day when there is plenty of light, (but not directly shining through the skylight), looks a good bet. But really, at some point, you as director, and or DP, have to make the call. That's why you are earning the big bucks-(euros?)!

Eric, you took the words right out of my mouth.

The online community is a nice tool but at some point you have to move on and just make your film (otherwise, you'll have to put all of us in the credits!) There's been a wealth of information in this thread alone about hallway shooting, probably more than you would get if you posed this question in a film school class, so have at it and please post the results when you are done.

i thought that after i posted it; I'm asking questions only i have the answers to.

I think the wide corridor with the skylights would be the most practical for the film, my only concern would be the changing light as the sun passes over.

Many thanks for all the advice, I'll post clips when i'm done.

Tony