How to light day exteriors

Hello and welcome to the Dapper Gaffer channel. I'm Josiah. We're here at City Stage Studios in Rockford, Illinois hanging out in the back lot today and we're talking about lighting day exteriors. Here we are in raw unmodified sunlight. We've at least picked that it's off to this side of the frame. How do we make day exteriors look good? Very similar to how we make anything else look good. What looks pleasing to the eye or cinematic is typically an offside key. Controlling your contrast ratio with a bounce or a fill and having some sort of a backlight to edge you out from the scene but we're having to do that with one primary source that's moving throughout the day. So talent isn't here yet but look how beautiful this scene looks already and we haven't done anything to modify the light. That's all about being here the right time of day with the right orientation to the sun. Using the sun as our backlight it can backlight the entire scene and it just looks great because we're here at the right time of day. Unfortunately the sun doesn't stay in the same spot all day and we're going to try to help you learn how to deal with that. All right so we've selected our composition for this shot. You know worked that out with the DP. We're shooting a medium wide I'd say on this setup and we're just setting some frames getting some stuff prepped before the talent gets here and this is all after we had meetings and scouts ahead of time to know what time we want to be here for this shot. So say you're shooting your shot at nine o'clock in the morning. Obviously we're not showing up at nine. We've discussed with production how much time we need beforehand to get everything set. We've been here for a while already so when talent actually comes in we're just making adjustments instead of lighting the whole scene around them and that's the probably the biggest thing that you can take away from lighting day exteriors is you want to be in the right place at the right time of day and be aware of where the sun is going to be if it's a sunny day because we have to orient ourselves to what the sun is doing and we just modify it from there. Hello Jude. Jude is our model today. So what we wanted to demonstrate with this wide setup was how if we're here at the right time of day we can shoot we can see everywhere we we want to see we can pan and move the camera and none of our modification gets in the way of the shot. Now we're going to try to sweeten it up a little bit and see what we can do while still keeping a nice wide frame. So let's go ahead and bring in that ultra bounce we've got here. And Josiah. Yep. Let's bring it let's bring it a little um more from the right side so not directly kind of in front of her. Wrappy. Just yeah don't wrap it as much. And pull your end back some. Nate you're good where you're at. Okay there we go that's good. The best way to see where the light is going and bouncing is to be right where the talent is because that's where you're directing the light. And I'm just looking at like where is where is the this bounce brightest to my eye and it's at that angle. So we brought Nate's in as close as we can still be out of frame and then adjusted that so we're hitting directly on this side. So that's doing nothing there. And just yeah 16 and a half ish. Okay go ahead and tilt that in. Yeah that's good there. And you can see that kind of soft push it it gives. It gave us about a stop of additional fill on this side. So we're we're pretty flat at the moment. Hopefully we could see that it's filled in her face a lot more. We've got this nice big non-sorcey light and the beauty of having something this size is we can be further away and it still makes a difference. You know if we were using like a 4x or something smaller than that it's just going to get harder and more sorcey. So having a 12x setup like this we can be further away and still cover this whole wide scene that we're dealing with here. Now we're going to add some additional dimension by subtracting light on this side. So this one we have this frame we have tilted backward because the sun's here. It's helping push the light this direction more. This one we're kind of just trying to subtract what other whatever natural fill light is coming on this side. So if we tilt the top toward us that's taking out some of that skylight that we have coming in. And yeah that's probably good there. And then we'll we're just going to try to drop it down as low as we can while still being out of frame. But now look at look at how much how much shape we have on Jude's face here. And we'll just measure that for for reference sake. What I'm doing here is just to block the sunlight so that's not affecting my reading. We're getting about a stop difference there. Okay so now just just to this is a good illustration of like you might think a 12x seems like a huge piece of material. They really start to feel pretty small outside and that's why why they they tend to be the go-to. They're about the the right size to be manageable without you know having just a bigger crew. But this is really about as close as we can be with these big modifiers. And you can see we were only able to get about a stop difference from one side of her face to the other. Now if it was if we were wanting to be a more dramatic scene we would probably want we would want more of a contrast than that. We could bring in you know maybe another another 12x back in that way as long as we could keep it out of the shot that would help create a little bit more. But on the on the camera side of her face there's not a whole lot more light we can take out without being in the shot or with going something much bigger like a fly swatter or something like that or tighten up our shot because obviously if we could if we could be tighter we don't have to see so wide we can bring modifiers in closer and have more more control over the ratio. For reference we're working off a three ton today even though we're in the back lot of the studio wanted to give you an idea of the tools you typically have to work with if you're working off a truck that size. So as you see stuff we're moving around with today this is all stuff that you would typically find on a three ton package. Could I get that half soft frost Nate? Copy, half soft frost. Thank you. A little bit of weight to that. All right so in this instance we swapped out our 12x in this side with a gold and silver lamé checker pattern. Sometimes you know we'll call it an Elvis rag because it looks like one of Elvis's jumpsuits or something like that. Yeah so we're just going to tilt this lamé in and out so you can see what it's doing for the scene here and as you can see it's doing an awful lot. Our sun is starting to wrap more around to this side of Jude's face you can see when she's facing this direction we're starting to spill on her nose which we were not getting before. So a lamé is in my mind it's like the the rag version of a reflector board you know it's just bigger and it's a you know it's soft but that it has a similar sort of reflectance quality you know somewhere between the soft and the hard side of a reflector board. So in my mind I think of it like we're putting up a 12x12 reflector board and I tend to gravitate toward the gold and silver checker because sometimes like if you use just silver it tends to be a little cool for my taste and if you if I use just gold it tends to be too warm. I'm still getting a real nice fill from that scene all the way to about here it starts to fall off a little bit. So we're still lighting a really nice breadth of this scene you know thanks to the size of our our bounce but it's just harsher because of you know the type of material that we're using. But with lamé you can be a lot further away and still fill in the scene so we're as you can see have a lot more distance on this side of the frame but we're getting a similar light level in the scene maybe just a touch more but you can see that the light's a lot harsher because it's just a more reflectant material than the ultra bounce that we were using before. And why don't we try just to turn this into a bit more of a side scratch you want so let's roll this whole frame around this side of the scene some more. Yep that's good and you're about the right angle too. How's that look on camera? That's much better. So we're we're side lighting her here I'm not seeing any like of that light come onto her right cheek which is what I'd be looking for. So I'd classify that as kind of like a side light scenario but it looks great nice and dynamic. It is you know very luminescent on her skin on that side just because of you know the material that we're using and and probably the skincare routine that you want to ask Jude about after the finish of this video. And we're going to do one more thing where we actually use this in conjunction with a thin piece of diffusion to show how that looks. Okay let's go ahead and bring that frame in about where we had that ultra bounce before. We're creating a book light essentially so we're going to use this as diffusion we don't have to you know match the angle of the sun we're just going to have it fairly straight up and down. And that's looking pretty good. Okay now let's move this LeMay back behind there. There it is out and tilting that guy back in. Oh look at how it just that's probably my favorite look of the ones that we've got so far aside from the sun being higher in the sky it's a nice medium between the two so it's a little bit more directional getting some more dimension on her face but it's obviously not as hard as just having that LeMay bouncing the raw sun back at her face. And the beauty of you know we're obviously not using any powered fixtures here the beauty of grip light you know they say grip light is the best light is that it undulates it fluctuates with the sun so if the sun you know goes behind we have like no clouds today but if the sun goes behind a cloud or you know it is moving slightly like every everything else is kind of working in the same ratios with each other as opposed to a hard light where it's not going to do that. When you're lighting the exteriors adaptability is key you got to be able to anticipate where the sun's starting where it's going to end and how to adjust to it throughout the day orient yourself to it and have a plan in place to make it work for your scene. Common practice wide shots early in the morning late in the afternoon and shoot the mediums and close-ups in the middle of the day. Now we happen to be pretty far north in the northern hemisphere Chicago area and we don't really we're not going to really get very ugly sun because it's late October and it's almost noon now and the sun is still in a decent workable condition. If you're closer to the equator you know middle of summer and the sun is like here that's the toughest thing to deal with. At the start of the day we had that beautiful broad backlight we picked this direction because of that time of day where we could shoot our wide now when the sun is coming to a less ideal location in the sky we're going to move in to our medium and tight shots where we have a lot more ability to control how that light looks. Hello again Jude. So here we are in the afternoon the sun's come around to this side it's no longer our backlight it's blasting us in the face. Let's bring in some diffusion and start to make it look good using the sun as our key light. I mean that's covering that and then let's get our reflector back there to try to bring the sun in from a similar angle. How did we select the diffusion that we used for this side? Well the background that you're shooting against kind of dictates what you can use there. We wanted it to be relatively soft because that's what we're going for earlier in the day but given that we still had a little bit of shadowiness in the background we could use something with a little bit of thickness to it. This is a quarter grid which is fairly thin but still has a good amount of diffusion quality to it. Since we had the backlight coming earlier we've just put a mirror board a shiny board back there to bounce the sun into the same angle roughly it was earlier and then we have this solid to control the fill to taste. And if you're shooting this out in a sequence I think we're close enough that you know the average viewer is not going to be able to tell that we shot it at a completely different time of day because we're moving into those closer shots and you'll probably have some transitionary elements or trickery to you know help the audience not see that. All right so we brought in some diffusion which looks a lot nicer for our key and is less blinding for the talent but you're seeing the issue that we have at the same time. This is a 12x we're using and you can clearly see the shadow on the ground all the way around us which is pretty unnatural. One other way you could mitigate that is to add foliage around the edges of this frame to kind of help it blend a little bit more organically into the scene as if there was maybe a tree off to this side and that's why typically you're going to schedule your mediums and your close-ups in the middle of the day to reduce the sizes of materials that you have to work with. Now let's say for some reason in this in this scene we needed to shoot toward this area with this hotter background behind us that's an instance where the diffusion choice is possibly dictated on what you're seeing back there. That building is kicking off some pretty hot light back at us so if we were to have a thicker diffusion than this up it would look unnatural like she's standing under an overhang in the middle of this open field or something like that. So we swapped that quarter grid out with half soft frost which is a thinner diffusion. It's one of my probably favorite to use as an exterior overhead diff because I think it does a great job of just slightly diffusing the sunlight you know making a little bit more pleasing on the skin but yet retaining a lot of the exposure value that we're getting if we're in a scenario where we have a bright background. Let's say we don't have the budget or the resources for 12x material on a project. 12x require an appropriate crew and a truck to transport the stuff in. The next best option and really one of the fastest ways to modify light outside in my opinion is working with 4x materials. So let's go ahead and light this scene one more time using only 4x materials. Now we've relit this scene using just 4x materials off that cart. As you can see it's really not a great solution for more than one person. The light's you know leaking down here and on Jude's legs but it's a fast way to work if you're you know kind of you doing like a medium or a tight on a single individual. So let's go ahead and recompose that shot to what we actually lit for. It's the same concept as before. We switched to a little thicker diffusion because I felt we could afford to do that. It's a half grid now neg on that side and still kicking that light back for a backlight on Jude as well. But we were able to set this up in much less time than it takes to skin up and move around 12x frames. In summary day exteriors is a lot about adapting to where the sun is in the sky at a particular time of day and using it to your advantage. But a lot of that goes back to pre-production and having the discussion with production about what time of day you're shooting what scenes in which direction. Preparation is key. The size of your materials have a big effect on what you can do compositionally but as we've seen hopefully today you can make a scene look pretty good without firing up a single powered fixture. We're really using the same lighting principles but just using different tools to achieve those results. Thanks for coming along with us today on this lighting journey. I hope it served as a good introduction for you on how to tackle lighting day exteriors. There's a lot more we could have talked about so if you have any questions on anything you would like some clarity on feel free to leave it in the comments and I'm sure we'll be shooting some future episodes regarding day exteriors in the future. That's all we've got for today. Thanks for sticking around. We'll see you on the next one. So this is kind of a two-fold illustration. If you have one of these on a truck it's a very fast way to move. I have everything I need here. My 4x you'll see I actually use combos to hold these up. I like using combos outside because they're more resistant to wind over c-stands and I can hook those on the back of the cart. I've got bags I can throw underneath. I've got all sorts of diffusion options here, solids and even some nets and our reflectors that you see in the back right right in the middle in the middle of the cart. Also if you're on a more of a budget you know project where you don't even have a cart like this you can still fit a fair few of these in a moderate size vehicle. Throw them in the back of a pickup truck or you know like a city van or something like that and it's still a fast way to work because they're pre-built you're not having to reskin frames or you know pop out diffusion stuff like that.