Shooting against a window

[Adj Brown]

I need to shoot with the talent in front of a window.
I've seen a black mesh type thing which you place over the window or behind the talent allowing you to see what's in the background (ie. through the window) but without allowing to much light in.
A bit vague I know, but does anyone know what this mesh stuff is called or where to get something similar?

[Nino Giannotti]

It's a single or double black net and is available from many manufacturers in several sizes, Westcott is probably the most popular. The double net will only reduce the light by about 1.5 stops and not enough to do the job that you are looking to do.

You are really jumping head on into the fire on this one, in order to do it right it will not be easy. You will need some powerful daylight balanced color light, HMI lights; don't even try to gel tungsten lights. You have two options, one would be to gel the window with ND (neutral density) gels, made by Rosco. They also make ND gel with CTO conversion so you can use tungsten lights.

The easiest way to do this sort of things especially for someone who doesn't have much experience and not much equipment is to wait for your shot until the daylight brightness balance your lights inside, it happens twice a day but this will give you a very short window to work with.

Anyway, below is the net at work. The normal use for the net is outside and we use it every time that we do an outdoor interview or stand-ups. The net also soften the background, which is a good thing most of the time; we often also use the net for indoor interviews just to soften and create additional separation from the background. If you need to keep the background sharp then your only solution will be gel.

[Bill Ward]

What a great set-up! Until, of course, the producer says: "...how 'bout we have him walk in from the pitcher's mound during the stand-up?"

[George Kroonder]

Especially for windows, RoscoVIEW could also be a consideration.

George/