How To Create Realistic Sunrise (or sunset) With Cinematic Lighting

Hello and welcome to the film set. My name is Brady. I'll be your host for the evening. And really what we got going on here we're walking in on an active film set right now and we're lighting it right now for sunrise interior. So what that means is we're faking that it is sunrise right now. I don't know the sun's off. Never ever land. We're never going to get it exactly here but we have this perfect sunrise scene that we need to shoot. So come along with me as we execute this show you where we place all the lights and exactly what we got to do to get in this exact situation that we are in now. So with sunrise we've got hard sun coming through from very horizontal directions. So that was kind of our first goal that we wanted to do. So I worked with my lighting team yesterday. Amazing lighting team. Shout out to Montana Video Production Reptiles. They've been amazing for my G&E team. So sun's going to be blasting through here like 7 a.m type sun. Very horizontal, warm, hot. And it's going to be shining on like whiskey bottles that are decorated throughout here. We'll have some oil lamps as well. But on him when he's here I like this sun motivating like a skip bounce off the wood tones that kind of soft return off of him. Because I mean when you're here it's it's pretty lit. Like it's not too bad. I think it's just taking what's here and just adding in sun early sunrise. And a lot of our prep and planning actually came together the day before on the pre-light. So essentially what a pre-light day is is a pressure-free day to work with your lighting team and get the lighting like 80% of the way there. That way when you come in on the day of production things are pretty much set up and smooth flowing for you and it just makes everything a lot easier. So that's when we walked through the blocking with the team figured out directions that we were shooting in and started to figure out the issues that we may run into on the day of. And then a lighting team would get to work placing everything and then getting a camera up so we can test that out and actually see if theory turns to reality. The scene starts with a bunch of reveal shots and boom a mess like the some sort of mess here. And then we go to the next mess which was I was thinking it was maybe on the bed if you want to slap some weight on the bed and there's like some old clothes and breadcrumbs or food or whatever nasty crap. Yeah. Then we get a close-up of his hands dealing with the rope. Okay. And we finally reveal a hole from back there. This scene was set up for actually a few different shots. We had the master wide. We had a few dialogues and some cutaways in there as well. So we're mainly going to focus on the wide lighting for the masters since that's the meat and potatoes of it all. And after that we can talk about some of the tights because they are so beautiful. The driving factor of this sunrise look and feel was this hot sun that we had coming through the window which ended up being an Aputure XT-26. I know we needed a bright light to overpower the daylight that was already existing. So we fired that up and we had that at about I want to say and we had that at 4,000 Kelvin. 4,000 to just give that warm look and feel to it as if the light is shining at say seven or eight in the morning. And this is going to set us up in a great position to get these shafts of sunlight coming through. So the look I was going for was something I actually called a soft hob technique. I stole that term. I don't know who came up with it but the goal of that is to just cut the hard light right about the chest and then keep the face a nice quality of soft light. Yeah this is the look. Honestly it's great. Yeah the level of that is perfect and when you get a little feather which is good. I think I like that. Yeah I think that's great. Okay and then we'll just torso. Yeah and then we'll just you know fix this accordingly. And I wanted to do this because this moment playing out has actually a level of beauty to it despite the hard time that he's going through. The scene ends positively and I wanted to show that by having a softer pleasing light on both the characters faces and just keep the hard sun on his body to preserve that early sunlit feel. But of course with the one light alone you know it just it's not ever enough. It just left too much darkness and I needed to light up the two characters a lot more. I wanted it to feel as if the sun was bouncing in through the windows, off the floor, off the tables, all these wood tones and then creating that natural beautiful sunlit bounce that just ambiently kind of scatters itself throughout a scene. And I wanted this light coming from below. We'll call it a skip bounce. It's one of the favorite things that I've been doing lately is skipping light off of a lower source into your talent. For this you can call me Deakins because we pulled out the muslin. I'm far from him but we'll go with it. We pulled out a 4x4 floppy of unbleached muslin and with that we just lit from the inside on this one. We just took a small Amaran 60x and I shot that straight down into the muslin. So that was kind of angled from below and by shooting it down it's kind of skipping from below and also kicking some off the floor as well rather than shooting it up which we tried in the first place. It just felt too sidey to me. So by shooting the light down pretty much into the floor it still kept this upward angle of our soft key light coming into his face. And having this very soft ambience just looked beautiful coming across our talent's face. It just felt like that sun was exactly blasting off of the wood and just giving a very subtle but soft wrap around his face and also a beautiful catch light in on the tight. And it also even played as like an edge light on the boy and the master as he entered the frame and I was okay with that. But as we know we're lighting spaces not just faces. The background definitely needed some decoration with light. So this wall originally was just dark there's not a lot of it was just flat it was boring whatever. So I wanted to take that sun that was coming in here and just kind of cheat and just shape it onto the wall as well. So I had them put a 1200x brought that to uh like a warm 4000 sunset. We're just gonna use that to just pepper some little like little speckles of sunlight on that wall just to bring up a little bit more contrast on that too. So it just feels like the sun is really filling the room instead of this really small narrow beam. Get right here and just scooch it in just skip it in a little bit further like a redirect that'll give it where's your target just dancing right here yeah we never like pull it back 10 feet and cookie it into the uh into the wall. And to explain to you what a cookie is it's actually called a cucoloris which is really just a board or something that's textured uh formally like metal or wood that's just got holes through it so as your light is casting through it it's going to create texture as if light is casting through a tree or something like that. So anything to get texture through there works it doesn't need to be a cookie like this it can just be leaves from a tree it can be curtains it can be anything just to break up this light so it doesn't have a flat quality to it as it hits the wall. And I don't know if it really even played out but off to the right I wanted to get some of those cooler undertones kind of like skies casting them from the other side. I love this cool like this cool tone that comes in that's kind of undertone. I like that subtly in here that's just like that really deep undertone in the shadows but I don't want it to be like overpowering the the call it the m40 whatever it is. So we had an infinity bar with a grid on it that was just out of frame on frame right and it was very cool acting as like a really gentle edge light maybe it was just for my imagination I don't know if it actually rendered on camera but we had it there so I wanted to camera speed so that was our master and the master sets you up for the direction of light that's coming in on your close-ups so when we move into these close of these dialogue over the shoulders we just pretty much took what we had and moved everything in a little bit closer. We can put the cameras somewhere where eye level for when he's sitting yeah let's see if we can take it though do the whole pass lighting wise let's just walk this in a little bit just so it could be a little bit more skippy and undery and then honestly we had that up there before but we're going to be tilting up so let's just walk it into the edge of frame just so it's not as crappy that that cool tone I just wanted like a gentle edge so we can walk it in like here yeah 72 so we're going to be about here yeah so we'll have to pull that um tilt you over to about like there so I don't know I guess I'll just walk this walk the lamp and then just panic because yeah if you can just aim for those uh shackles and stuff okay whatever those are those would be sweet and that'll be everything we need and I'll typically do things like this as the camera's moving tighter I just adjust the light just to beautify it and polish it up and for all the power my gaffer was running everything into a Honda 7k generator which was just barely enough for everything because we did have the 2600 and the 1200 but we managed to squeeze it all onto that without having to pull any others and oftentimes when you're on locations like this you actually don't have power there or don't have access to any power on location so that's kind of what was going on here so we had to bring in some external generators the part that I love about larger sets like this is how collaborative it is as a DP I'm not the only one doing all the work I was constantly working with my director Lucas my gaffer Tyler my grip Sam and the rest of the team and together we're all throwing in ideas to really get exactly what the vision is that we want so call this the only sunrise lighting tutorial that you will ever need uh because I need clicks and views baby but uh that's all right anyway I hope this is helpful this is a fun scene I do want to mention that all of these scenes are part of a bigger feature film that is written and being funded right now so if you're feeling generous and kind today I will ask for a small donation of I don't know two dollars one dollar whatever it is down below that helps fund this feature film down the line because that means more educational content for all of us and more fun where we can play around on set so I'm going to leave a link down below but that's all I got for you guys there's going to be more scenes of many coming into this YouTube channel here for this film but just buckle up stay tuned and I'll see you guys in the next video I need a beer