Filming with Natural Light

How to Control Sunlight on Your Set

Sunlight is the ultimate free tool for both low-budget and high-end productions. When you have renown films such as The Revenant, shot near enough entirely in natural light (aside from a few shots), it opens the doors of inspiration for what is possible. However, controlling and manipulating the sunlight is a different ballgame, even more so when you’re using sunlight to assist your lights in an interior location.

Today, on 4-minute film school, we explore how to do just that. Watch the tutorial below to see how Director of Photography Valentina Vee shapes and supplements the natural sunlight when shooting a high key commercial montage sequence.

Our blog articles going forward will aim to provide additional assessment and explanation of the techniques used on our sets. So, if the episodes move too fast for you — we’re happy to provide these follow-up articles for more clarity.

The Premise

As always, we love to introduce a premise to the tutorial to explain the educational content better. In this tutorial, we’re going to film a commercial for a locally owned trinket shop that is finally reopening after an extended closure. We want the commercial to be optimistic, bright, and display excitement to the return of customers for this small business owner.

To visually promote this, Valentina is opting towards a high key lighting configuration. Not too sure what high key is? It’s defined as;

“High Key is a style of lighting that is bright and shadowless with lots of fill light. It was used a lot in the classic Hollywood period in the 1930s and 40s, particularly for comedies and musicals… Today high key lighting is primarily used for cosmetic commercials, sitcoms, and music videos.”

Location

While shooting outdoors in natural sunlight can be one of the more relaxing exercises in filmmaking, using sunlight as a tool for interior shoots comes with its own set of complexities. The primary issue being that the sun is ever moving, meaning you’ll need to work quickly, or your shots will start to look very disjointed, both with light direction, shadow length, and color temperature.

In the beautiful film The Tree of Life by Terrance Mallick, they filmed in three different houses for the same store location. Each had a different orientation to the sun; they could film in the ‘same room’ all day long with natural sunlight.

“If we had a room that faced east, we could shoot early in the morning, and if it faced west, we could shoot later in the afternoon. Terry took that to the extreme by having the same room represented in several houses so that we could shoot at different times of the day.” — Production Designer Jack Fisk

In our case, to somewhat lessen the need to adjust the modifying tools continually, we shot the scene on a studio backlot to have more control over the environment. What does that control consist of?

1. Light spill

2. Light directionality

3. Optimizing the location

As previously stated, in the Tree of Life, they used three houses to control the light direction continually. Of course, the practicality of having such luxury only really falls to feature film financing, or at the very least, being in a fortunate position with a group of filmmakers who have three identical houses. If you’re in neither group, you want to try and film in a location that has indirect sunlight.

Using the PhotoPills app (a $9.99 app I highly recommend), we could see that the sun would be hitting the back of the building for the entirety of the day, leaving the set filled with ambient light. This is great because it means you’re not going to have to adjust your lighting, and indirect sunlight is ideal for keeping continuity.

If you’re filming a single shot near the window, this might be alright. However, in our circumstance, the ambient light makes the scene extremely flat, and this is where we’ll need to start adding light to give the scene a high key look.

Lights

The first light you’re going to want to set up is your light used to mimic the sunlight. As the location doesn’t have any streaks of the sun coming in through the window, this gives us a lot of room to position the primary light. As noted with the PhotoPills app, you will want to check where the sun will fall throughout the day at your location to avoid any unwanted light.

Using an Ls 600d Pro for sunlight, which has 8,500+ lux at 3m, making it perfect for replicating direct sunlight, we’re going to position that outside (using a rolling combo stand) facing into the primary window behind the talent. However, replicating direct sunlight requires an additional measure than simply just adding very bright light to the location. The directionality of said light also plays a vital element.

For our example, the lighting needs to represent a mid-morning look. So the angle of our lights will also play a crucial component in obtaining the look for the time of day we’re trying to achieve. Placing the lights high and angling them into the room will help imitate the sun with light falling onto the talent to resemble how natural shadows are cast.

If you place a light near enough parallel to the window, the shadows will be stretched and have a soft falloff, which is what we typically associate with early morning and late evening (golden hour) light. Lights placed higher and angled down will have shorter and harsher shadows which is what sunlight from mid-morning to later afternoon projects.

Of course, placing lights directly outside of a window brings its own set of problems; the primary issue is of the light stand bursting into view. To rectify this issue, we can place a set of sheers over the window to hide the stand, and additionally, the sheers will also soften the light, adding to the high key look.

While the Ls 600d Pro illuminates the location, we need to add a key because the talent is falling too much into the shadows.

In our example, we’ll use an LS 300d II with a Light Dome SE. The LS 300d II is less intense and smaller than the Ls 600d Pro, and the Light Dome SE provides beautiful soft diffusion while also being smaller than the standard Light Dome. Why have I hit home about both the light and diffusion apparatus being smaller? Well, we’re going to rig these lights overhead.

Overhead rigging allows freedom of movement for not only the talent but the operators also. As we plan to shoot a wide on a Steadicam, then punch in on the sticks, overhead rigging allows for ease of access between the two setups. Remember, the fewer setup changes, the longer you can be rolling.

However, there are some caveats to remember when it comes to overhead rigging. When using a c-clamp to clamp onto a pre-existing structure within the location, you’re going to want to use cribbing. This is essentially just a term for two pieces of wood that will stop the clamp from damaging the property. Additionally, you’re also going to want to use a safety chain, which will prevent the light from crashing to the ground or on top of someone.

The diffused 300d now provides a beautiful key to our talent. However, there’s a slight lack of depth to the talent, and we can resolve this by placing a rim light to bring her away from the set wall, which will also be placed overhead.

To avoid having the light spill onto all areas of the scene, we will use barn doors to control the light to target the talent specifically. At this stage, the shot looks excellent, but there’s still more room for finessing the composition, and that’s by removing some of the ambient light to give the scene more dynamism and depth.

Remember, lighting can be as much about subtracting light as it is adding light. And while a high key look is regarded as shadowless, if you add too much light, you can essentially make the location look as flat as it was without the additional lighting tools.

There’s a window that won’t be within any of the compositions in our location, and it’s overloading the foreground with unwanted ambient light. To remove this, we’re going to add a floppy. This is a 4x4 flag with an additional layer of fabric that flops over — it’s in the name! When setting up floppies, you’re going to want to make sure that the pin is on the outside to avoid the floppy tipping over, and you also may need to tape the fabric segment down if it’s allowing for any light leaks. Of course, like the c-clamps, please ensure that you don’t damage the paintwork of the property when using gaffe tape.

For one final addition, it was apparent that the rim light was a little too hot, and as such, Valentina wanted to reduce the exposure to even out the 300d II slightly. However, that would also lessen the impact of the 600d acting as the sun. To counter this, another 600d was added outside.

For the Gear Heads

Before signing out, I want to share with everyone some of the technical details of the gear that was used.

In this specific commercial shoot, we had the Canon C70 with a set of Rokinon Xeen lenses. When shooting high key, there’s a lot of light being used, and it can quickly wreak havoc on your exposure. With the C70, as it houses built-in NDs, we could easily keep the highlights around 80 IRE without the need to constantly swap between filters.

To further supplement the optimistic and dream-like feel, we added a Black Pro-Mist filter to soften the look and create a pleasant bloom around the edges of the image.

Be sure to check out the full Four Minute Film School playlist on Aputure’s Official YouTube channel, and stay creative.