The First Musketeer – the period web series I DPed in France in 2013 – gave me one of the biggest challenges in simulating candlelight. Almost every scene had candles in it (albeit fake, yet very convincing, LED ones) and it was always a struggle to make them appear to be shedding authentic light.
As the sensitivity and dynamic range of cameras has increased, practicals have become a more and more important and popular tool in the cinematographer’s arsenal. A practical is any light source that appears in the frame. It could be a fluorescent strip-light, a table lamp, car headlights, candles, a fireplace, an iPad, fairy lights, street lamps, a torch, a security light… any light that could be realistically found in the place where your scene is set.
The first step in lighting a daytime interior scene is almost always to blast a light through the window. Sometimes soft light is the right choice for this, but unless you’re on a big production you simply may not have the huge units and generators necessary to bounce light and still have a reasonable amount of it coming through the window. So in low budget land, hard light is usually the way we have to go.
In this tutorial, Pro Tools users can learn how to create realistic mono or stereo double tracks instantly from a mono input track with SynchroArts' Revoice Pro and its "Quick Doubler" process.
In this featurette, Production Sound Mixer Jonah Guelzo gives you an inside look at one of his go-to tools to maximize the use of your on-set dialog recordings. At times, you can run into all sorts of problematic sound situations. By recording wild-lines, you allow yourself the versatility needed for later on in the mix.
Sometimes when shooting indoors, you need to make day look like night. And believe it or not, there’s an art to blacking out windows.
Light is like water: it leaks in through the tiniest crack, and you need to appreciate that if you’re going to black out a window successfully. Here are my tips.