09/21/2024
‼️ This is another test ‼️
Dialing in our "day-for-night to dawn" transition. We shot this in the middle of a bright and sunny day. Quite a stark improvement from our last go around, but already we can see some areas where we need to improve upon.
For one, we did not have enough ND to make outside truly appear as night. Ideally, I would have liked to at least had one more full-stop of ND to darken our image, but then our lights would have not been powerful enough. We also wanted to stay pretty shallow with our DoF at T4.0 to get some bokeh and hide imperfections in the background that would give away the time of day.
Originally, I'd wanted to blast some light onto the background where the fence line was, but it couldn't overtake the sunlight at full blast, and we were left with little light on our subject to bring them back to day, so we had to cut that light and move it inside for our key.
This was a 3-point lighting setup, so pretty simple. One Aputure 1200D as backlight right outside the sliding glass door motivating our sunlight and another 1200D inside on our subject side-lit with gridded diffusion and some CTOs to warm up the tone a bit, and then a 300x on fill side set to 2700K. To bring up the lights, we did the 300x manually while bringing up the 1200Ds with the Sidus Link application on our phones.
On cam, we had 4 stops of ND and a circular polarizer adding about half a stop, then set our temp at 3200K to render the scene blue when the lights were dim and become warmer as the lights come up.
Lastly, in the opening night portion, our subject is pretty dark in the face, even with a supposed computer display on in front of them, which does take away from the mise-en-scene of the shot. Of course, we planned for this, but our little block light was dead and corroded, so we had to make due.
Still far from perfection, but we did better than the last time, and we will do even better on the next one.