Shooting in rooms with all white walls, ceilings and furniture

[Mark Collins]

Hey All!

So I'm the gaffer on a TV pilot this weekend, and it's one of those nightmare productions that I'll be bitching about later. Anyway, one of the problems I'm facing is that the majority of our locations are rooms that are painted completely white, like everything but the floor is white. Lighting is a pain in the ass in the sense that I cannot point any lights in any direction without having them bounce across the room in fairly uncontrollable ways.

So, any tips for lighting in that kind of environment? anything I can use on the walls (besides paint) to help out, such as dulling spray maybe? or hairspray?

Thanks

 

[Francesco Bonomo]

Hey All!

So I'm the gaffer on a TV pilot this weekend, and it's one of those nightmare productions that I'll be bitching about later. Anyway, one of the problems I'm facing is that the majority of our locations are rooms that are painted completely white, like everything but the floor is white. Lighting is a pain in the ass in the sense that I cannot point any lights in any direction without having them bounce across the room in fairly uncontrollable ways.

So, any tips for lighting in that kind of environment? anything I can use on the walls (besides paint) to help out, such as dulling spray maybe? or hairspray?

Thanks

Hey Mark,
we shot a short film once (35mm) and the house we were shooting in was mostly white (walls, ceilings, some of the furniture, AND even floors, though those were nice because it was a very old-ish-looking wooden floor). I don't have it on my computer, but I'll PM you if I manage to get some clips from the director. What we did at the time was "embracing" the white, since we knew the moment we would point any kind of light at anything we would be in bounce-hell (and it was very low-budget, so we couldn't really change the location or paint the walls). We used only soft light (mainly kinoflos), natural sunlight coming from the windows (if I remember correctly we had hmi's but we didn't need them until the very last shot, and all the scenes we were shooting there were set during daytime), and used flags to model the light the way we wanted. A GREAT help came from the costumes we used and from the production design, because they both helped create some kind of contrast by putting some non-white elements where needed. I have to say we never went too close to the actors, and camera movement was very subtle, i.e we chose to shoot quite wide in most shots and tried to create interesting composition within the frame. Of course, as usual, it depends on the story and how you want to shoot it, but in our case it worked pretty well.

 

[D Fuller]

If it were me, I'd go prepared with a lot of negative fill options.

 

[ericyoung]

Big polyboards, black side for negative fill, with lots of c-stands and arms to mount them!

 

[Steve Das]

If it were me, I'd go prepared with a lot of negative fill options.

One option would be to just shoot the scenes in all close-ups and try to model the faces with the
negative fill.

Another would be to cover-up all exterior windows and start from total black and then just
be carefull with what lights you fire up through the windows. Or turn the scene into a
practical lit night interior.

Third would be to go with the high-key look..but sounds like you've runled that one out.

 

[JPSendall]

I would ND the windows at 9 or more if needed and then create pools of dark and light with daylight kinos etc. Try to create a natural fall off from the window until it reaches the subject where you can then light to a darker background creating some nice contrast. The trick would be not to see the windows if you can because the perceived difference in exposure might look odd but I know for a fact the a good grader can pull the windows up or down even in moving shots. Art department can surely help by putting things in like paintings or art work that breaks the whites up? Best of luck.

Oops just noticed the shoot is past. Hope it went well.

 

[Mark Collins]

One option would be to just shoot the scenes in all close-ups and try to model the faces with the
negative fill.

Another would be to cover-up all exterior windows and start from total black and then just
be carefull with what lights you fire up through the windows. Or turn the scene into a
practical lit night interior.

Third would be to go with the high-key look..but sounds like you've runled that one out.

That was my original approach, or would have been if we had the budget to pull it off.

Just a note, since the shoot is now over, we did what we could on all the set ups for the lighting, and blacked off as many windows as we could. No ND at all, though if we had it I would have used the hell out of it. We ended up scrimming down the lights far enough so that they would just be hitting the actors. no preferable, but better than having light bouncing everywhere uncontrollably. The biggest issue came into play when we were shooting in a large loft with 8 massive windows and all white walls, plus a skylight. because we weren't seeing the skylight we went to the roof and put a 6x6 solid over that, eliminating one source. However, because of the directors insistence on shooting towards the windows, we couldn't do anything with them, given our resources. I did use my light meter to check footcandles during one shot though, and when a cloud passed in front of the sun we went from 320 footcandles to 80, and then back up once the cloud disappeared....not preferable at all.

 

[Matt W.]

I don't think any director would defer to the gaffer's request to shoot everything in CUs...

If you could post some set ups and what kind of results you got I think that would be pretty edifying. Once the footage has been cleared to post, of course. I found myself in this situation a week ago and just did a half-assed approach (like what other options did I have?), but we were blessed by night interiors, at least. The funny thing is that even off-white or "cream" or whatever is so far preferable to white and shooting in off-white rooms rarely poses a problem. I always struggle with this, and I assume others do, so I think it might be worth keeping this thread open and inviting further discussion. I recently told a friend "my book on cinematography would be one sentence long: paint the walls dark and use natural light;" he wasn't impressed.