TRANSITIONS UNIT: TEST SHOOT

Today, we went to the location and did a test shoot with all the lighting, kit and a stand in (Victoria) for the shoot day. Although I had a clear idea for what sort of lighting I wanted, I wanted to make sure I knew exactly where everything would be set up, prior to filming so that set up could be nice and quick.

Lighting Tests

The main aim for this test was to get the moonlight style of lighting correct. For this I knew I needed a key light as my main light to give that shadow coming in to give off the effect of Moonlight. With this, I used the The Yongnuo YN216 Pro LED as my main light as it was the smallest but most powerful, so it gave a strong light which caused that contrast on the actors face. Playing this outside the house shining through one of the side windows so it got the contrast on the face. Victoria also had net curtains up on the windows which brought a slight amount of diffusion to the lights which worked really well and helped to keep the focus on the scene and not what was going on outside the window. Once that was done I added in a Photography -45W Day light soft box light to fill the room with light but not so much that it looked unnatural. With this, I got the effect of moonlight coming in through the window which is what I wanted, I did have to fiddle around with the brightness of the lights and only have 3 out of 5 bulbs turned on with the soft box so it looked more natural.

What I found after this was that my Actor had the moonlight effect in the background, but there wasn't enough light on her face to show the detail and there for, we would lose the desired effect. Before bringing in the YN006 light, I brought in a very small, white camping light. Although small, it is powerful and allowed me to add in more light to the actors face. Although it worked fairly well, it didn't get enough light on the actor to bring out the detail in her face. We tried having this close up and then away with a diffuser up but neither worked well enough. So with this, I changed over to the YN006 light and had it on 1% which was more than enough, then bounced it off the roof to get the detail on the face, without losing the reflections from the moonlight we had already created.

Below is the tests I did with the camera and lighting:

Test 1 - This is where I simply set up the lighting and camera. The lighting was ideal for what I needed, got the right shadows and contrast but when looking through the camera I couldn't see anything. I brought the ISO up to 800 but in the footage I could start to see some noise, I also didn't like the shot, found it had a bit too much light and didn't look like it was moonlight. Bringing it down to ISO 500 I found the balance here but with the issue that there wasn't enough light to bring out the detail on the other half of our actors face.

Test 2 - Here I kept the 2 lights outside and kept the camera on the same settings. Widened the shot (testing to see how much of the room I could get in) and added in the YN006 light at 50% pointed up to the roof. Although this did add in the light I needed, I found that it was too much and the contrast on the actors face was lost. Although it can still be seen in the bottom left of the frame on the floor but this wasn't what I wanted. I changed the % of light coming from the YN006 (no footage of this due to file corruption) until I found the perfect balance was with the YN006 at 1% as it wasn't enough light to kill the contrast but enough to bring out the detail on the other half of my actors face.

Test 3 - This was where I wanted my lighting change. I had brought a 60W Tungsten light to act as the lighting change but this just flooded the room and ruined the shout. I wanted it to look like a lamp light was on... so that's what we did. Adding in a desk lamp added just the right amount of light required and warmed the scene. I tested having this scene on my shoulder mount as this is where I want to change the camera movement and it works really well. The movement is subtle but adds to the story and I think with the change in tone it'll really help. 

Test 4 - This is where Malcolm enters the flat block and hears Jessica screaming and shouting. I wanted the light off for this as I don't really want Malcolm fully seen yet. So I wanted to start in darkness and have the light brought in my Malcolm turning the light on. I tried this with the settings I had on the camera already and then with the light being introduced but it just doesn't look very pleasing. You see hardly anything till the light is turned on. I added in the Yongnuo YN216 Pro LED right far back on 100% to give the effect of moonlight. This worked but still couldn't see as much as I wanted. So I turned on the back light of the hallway which brought out the detail I needed more and worked really well.

Test 5 - This was the test of the gimbal (Export messed up so the blue line turned up) This worked really well as it got the sort of shot I needed and really helped add more of a cinematic look.