northfork question

[Lazlo]

Just saw northfork, really superb work, although I'm sure you've heard it a million times... With the interiors and the blown out windows, how did you deal with lens flares? Everytime I've tried lighting from outside, I always have to be incredibly careful with lens flares and pointing the camera directly at the window. Any tricks with that? To be fair, due to not having any money and very little resources, I had to use 1k open face arri lights, which were challenging to control... does the light just have to be soft enough? Thanks.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Just depends on how hot the window is. Since I was using big HMI's to light the interior to a decent f-stop, the balance with the exterior wasn't too bad, not nuclear. Sometimes I put a double-net scrim outside the window to knock the brightness down a little since the Primo anamorphics were prone to flaring. A scrim on a frame is faster than putting ND gel on the window and it throws the view slightly out of focus, washes it out. But the main advantage is that the scrim can be a few feet away from the window so you can shine a light between the gap of the scrim frame and the window. Trouble with a scrim is that a double-net only cuts one stop of light -- you'd need ND gel for anything heavier.

In the location for the orphanage scenes, the real view outside the windows was of a busy street in the middle of a city, so I put big frames of white Griflon out there to white-out the view, then lowered the blinds over the window to break up the whiteness. I could control how hot the white view was by how much light I put on them. Sometimes I didn't put any light on the griflons, they just got ambient skylight on them.