DIRECTIONS UNIT: 8TH FEB TECH RUN

Since I wanted a very specific lighting style for the scene inside the pub, I decided to do a tech run a week before the shoot. I was already aware of the lighting and sound I'd get from the house and street since I have been there before. But with the pub, I didn't want to waste time on set during the shoot testing and trying to get the lighting right and we also weren't sure how to have the pub set out so I organised for myself, my DOP (Trine Hagan) and my Sound Operator (Jack Nix) to go for a tech run a week before the shoot so we could sort all of this.

Pub Layout
When we got to the pub we found that all the tables were in the corners or up against the walls. This, at first, I thought wasn't an issue. Until we set up the camera and saw that we wouldn't be able to do a shot-reverse-shot for Shaun and Ed. As well, the background was just boring. All you'd see is a window. So we moved the table more to the middle of the room so that in the background of both characters, we could have the bar and the extras in the background, helping to sell the scene and make it more interesting to watch on screen.

This worked much better and when we saw it through the camera it looked really good. As well we tested the sound at this point and we didn't have any issues with this here, it was nice and clear and no background noises apart from cars driving outside which we couldn't avoid since we can't close down the road. Once we had the pub set up we began setting up the lighting.

Lighting the pub
Going off what we had done in the lighting workshop, we set up the key light in front of the table and aimed it aside, after that we also set aside another light to bring more light. The third light we set behind the two actors to bring some more light to them and bring the set alive more.



















This lighting worked really well, this can easily be changed when moving from Shaun to Ed and lights up the background as well as the foreground. After this we moved on to the two extras who get focus in the film which is snakehips and the woman. Snakehips sits by the bar and drinks alone. Here we had an issue with shadows, when we put the key light on him and there was serious shadows behind him, we ended up putting a light to the side which helped slightly but overly exposed him. However, when we tried out the LED lighting for this section it worked much better and helped give the right exposure on him.

After we had done this we moved onto the woman. Here, the issue was with the mirror that was next to the table. We tried aiming the lights but it always caused reflections or lens flares due to the mirror. But we tried something else which was, we bounced the light from the roof which made a perfect amount of light down on our actor. It lit up perfectly in the small corner.

This tech run was very beneficial and was a really good choice as a Director as it allowed me to not only review the location but helped me to decided and set up the lighting in advance of the shoot meaning I have much more time to work with my actors on the shoot days and my crew and fully aware of what I wanted from the lighting and camera set up.