Visual Star Media

Night exteriors on a budget can be daunting, especially lighting large spaces. My approach simplifies the process: determine the light’s motivation—moonlight, streetlights, or a fire pit—and treat the scene like any other, adjusting for scale. Large exteriors follow the same principles as smaller scenes but require larger, more distant sources.

For this shoot, DP and I discussed going for a purely moonlit look. We chose a hard-ish moonlight to backlight falling snow, paired with a soft bounce for fill or key depending on the talent’s orientation.

The main hard moonlight came from an upstage 3/4 backlit angle to light the barn area. To emulate the far-reaching quality of moonlight, we used reflectors for added height and distance. An .lighting 1200D with a narrow reflector shot into a 50cm CRLS #2 and a 4x beadboard soft side, both rigged on a mombo. This provided a blend of hard specular light and soft ambient fill from one source.

For soft fill, a 600D was shot into an 8x8 Ultrabounce, with flags shaping the spill. Inside the barn, titan tubes added a warm interior glow.

A radi 4x4 litemat served as the augmenting key for mediums and close-ups, complementing the 8x8 while providing a flattering shape to pick out talent against the background.

To enhance the scene, a snowmaker FX machine was rigged on a triple riser top stick and rotated for realistic snowfall.

Client:
Agency:
DP:
Gaffer: ☝️ .dp
KG/Snowmaker:
Team Lead:
Talent: & Lily
Music:

So you’re lighting for an interview style frame, but it’s for a commercial project, where you have a bigger budget then your typical doc style interview, what can we do to spice things up a little?

This case study of a recent commercial I DP’ed and directed. We were going for a “Masterclass” Style look.

I like to start by lighting the space and establish a look that will stay consistent through the day.

The first step is to block the direct sunlight from hitting the windows. To do this my key grip set up a 12x ultra bounce “shelf” outside the largest window of the living room set with the white side down. We doubled duty this frame and also bounced (2) 2400B’s into them to bring soft ambient light from above into the room. This helps bring in the “room tone” or ambience a stop or two above what the natural daylight creates, helping maintain a consistent level through the day.

Next we set up our splash of sun in the background. We employed the reflecting off the mirror trick in order to double the distance and height of our source so that we get more realistic looking sun (I have another breakdown going into detail of the physics of this technique in a previous post) We used (2) Nanlux 1200B’s with fresnels at full spot, going through 1/4 CTS.

Jumping inside we key talent with a two part combo. We use a spectrum 4 as a key/edge which only hits less then half the face, and then use a 1200C Panel through a 6x bleached Muslim w/ a 50d egg crate to wrap that light around the face. By using a slightly harder source, then layering a larger soft source, it creates more of a gradient on the face that feels pleasing and more 3 dimensional then simply using one single soft source to key.

Then the classic Litemat spectrum 2l as a black hair light motivated by the sun splash.

Just a a bit of extra ambient with a 500B w/ projector into the ceiling, a floppy for negative fill

Client:
Production Company: .films

Director/DP: .dp ☝️
Producer:
Gaffer:
Key Grip:
Swing: mike Pacyna

Editor:
Colorist: ☝️

set up with our Gemini and Ronin 2. Such a grea and easy to build chase car set up 🙌🏻 Shout to for hooking us up with the car rigging gear to make it happen. Check them out if you’re in the New York City area

Huge thanks to our friends at renting and helping us with pre rigging for a set up at the front of the vehicle.
If you’re in the NYC area and need to rent a kit for rigging a black arm and/or expert car rigging consulting these are your guys!

Scene two last week's STEM Studies commercial Shoot. Shot on Ursa Mini 4.6k.

Director of Photography: Leo Quintero

BTS Pics at the end