Planning lighting throughout a sequence
SnowSultan
Posts: 3,798
Does anyone happen to know what the recommended workflow would be for planning the lighting for an animation or series of images where the characters change location often during the sequence? For example, if your scene involves two characters chasing each other on foot through a park, and you want to avoid the sun shining directly on their faces (as is usually recommended), would one set up the environment and sun position first and then plan your posing and camera angles around them? Or if you have specific angles and poses in mind, would you then plan those out and then position the sun wherever it will shine on their sides or back the most throughout the sequence?
I have had to make such sequences a few times, and by far the hardest part of the whole thing was getting the lighting to look decent throughout all the frames without changing it. I'd be curious to know how this is planned out in professional work or movies. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
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Post-production is your friend. Since the advent of color, Hollywood has always relied on manipulating color and exposure in post (refered to as color timing back in the old photochemical days as the process involved how long each frame of film was exposed to the primary colors of light, and digital grading in the modern era, to patch things together, as quite often a films final edit may be meshing footage shot weeks apart under wildly different circumstances and out of the order in which it was originally intended to be used in. With that in mind, it's much easier to make everything match if you render out your sequences as if you were shooting in RAW mode.... which is to say, aiming for a relatively neutral level image without burned out whites or oversaturated blacks and colors. If you wait to do the heavy contrast and oversaturated colors afterwards, you can do some very subtle blends by hainvg the color balance of a scene actually slowly change over the length of a single cut, which makes it far easier to blend lighting from shot to shot.
Beyond that, it's usually more effective to keep lights in the same general postion on screen than it is to try to match lighting perfectly in position on a map grid. It's similar to the 180 rule used for photography, wherein you draw a line down the middle of the set and only film towards that line in an arc from one side so that characters who're talking to each other don't keep flipping relative positions from the left side to the right (occasionally you see this done in films by first time directors and it can be VERY jarring.)
Thank you, but my question is really more about light placement than post-production color correction. If the sun is in a different position when a film crew comes back to finish a scene, do they wait until the sun is in the position they want, or do they leave fixing that up to post-production too? I don't think I could re-light a 3D render purely in postwork, but we don't have to because we can move the sun wherever we need it. What I'm trying to figure out is if you don't want the sun to be in someone's face during a sequence, and the sequence will only last a few real-time minutes (so the sun will not move significantly over the course of the shot), do you basically plan the whole sequence around where the sun is?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hour_(photography)
On most productions the entire shoot is based around exactly where the sun will be, which is the reason that most films are shot in parts of the world that have very consistant weather patterns, so when a film crew hits a location, they've already worked out when, where and how they plan to shoot on every day, with alternate shooting locations set up to film different scenes in case the weather doesn't cooperate. That's how the movie business ended up being based mostly in California, even though New York was actually the original capital of motion picture production. However, between the vastly more consistant weather (and the greater distance from the questionable practices of Edison's overzealous patent agents), most producers quickly moved to Los Angeles with its months of clear sunshine and never looked back.
Now, all that said, the one thing to remember is that, for most purposes, what most DPs would consider the ideal light for shooting a film would be that of a mildly overcast day, both because that soft even light makes the actors look much more attractive, and because it's middle of the roadness makes it much harder to tell the difference between shots taken at different times of the day, on different days, or even at different locations. As a result, the approach for any scenes involving actors is NOT to shoot the existing light "as is", but instead to try to mitigate whatever Mother Nature has cooked up and tame the natural lighting as much as possible in order to create something that remains as consistant as possible for as long as possible. It's not really realistic, of course, but after many years audiences have become brainwashed to accept movie reality as reality. So, if you look at production photos of films being shot at outdoor locatioon, you'll see that the lighting and grip kits tend to include a large array of different lights and reflectors used to fill in the shadows (and augment the key light when a cloud appears,) as well a a large assortment of scrims, gobos and even smoke pots to soften and diffuse the natural light, so that ultimately, even though they're shooting outside in the great outdoors, the odds are that the actors will be working in an area of artificial semi-shade where the natural light has been considerably softened...and when that's not possible, there's a tendency to go to backlighting so that the visible parts of the actors aren't being harshend with long shadows.
Thank you, that helps somewhat. In my tests, I certainly have learned why overcast day lighting is used often, particular in trying to make modern games look as realistic as possible. I guess in the end, I do need to plan any sort of short sequence of images around the sun location, and adjust posing and viewing angles to avoid overblown sun lighting. Thanks again.