The most important decision to me in lighting an actor, is deciding the direction of the key. I make this decision based on the character's emotional state in the context of the scene. Sometimes there is no key light, as illustrated by the following frame grab.
Here, Daniel, our protagonist has received a letter that will soon initiate the start of his emotional descent. Originally, this scene didn't have anything special planned, but I knew I could lend the scene some weight through composition and lighting. I wanted to silhouette our character so that the darkness of the shot would foreshadow things to come. I asked Andrew to move this scene to the entrance of the house and have the actor come through the front door. Then, I put a 35mm lens on the camera and pointed it down the length of the hallway.
I set the HVX on the CineLike-D setting, which gives the image the most dynamic range and the most film-like look. I actually find this setting to be a bit too low-contrast for my taste, but the idea is to give the footage the most information as possible so that you can fine-tune the image later on in color-correction. I also like to lower the pedestal (black level) to around -5 to give the blacks a bit more punch and increase the overall contrast a bit. Finally, I bumped the detail level up to +3.
To "light" the character, I simply put a 1K fresnel just around the corner of the far end of the hallway and focused it on our actor's final mark after he enters the house. When he walks through the door and lands on his mark, he's silhouetted by the front door with just a bit of light outlining his body. It's hard to tell in this specific frame grab, but if you look closer you can see that to motivate my light, I put a small practical lamp with a 15W bulb on a table stand just before the hallway.
These are the kinds of shots where I think the M2 really stands out. Despite this shot being fairly wide, it's clear that the foreground is soft. You can tell by looking at the reflection of the light on the wall on the left side of the frame. If I had composed the same frame on the HVX without the Red Rock, the whole frame would be sharp, making the shot far less powerful.
The next frame grab reveals the opposite approach to lighting talent. Here we have our female lead playing the role of Jessica, a young expecting wife, concerned about the future of their livelihood. Her well-meaning husband has gotten into a situation that threatens to ruin them, and now they have a baby on the way to worry about.
Here, I lit our actor almost frontally with a 1200 HMI through 216 diffusion. The light was placed outside the house and aimed through the kitchen sink window. I elected to light her in a way that would show her innocence in the circumstances while trying to keep the frame dark to add weight to the scene. Actually, I did it as close as I could in camera, and Andrew crushed the blacks and increased the contrast in post. During prep we had discussed what look we felt would serve the story best and we agreed that we wanted a high-contrast, gritty feel with muted colours. I think this shot is a good example of that.
