Shooting a "Poor-man's Process" Car Interior Scene

"Poor-man's Process"! This scene that I shot for Madam Secretary ep. 409 features a common alternative workflow to either a freedrive or a process trailer, involving a static car and compositing driving plates into greenscreen footage. First, the scene:

We set up the three-sided greenscreen box in the parking lot at the stage. The box is topped with a silk to allow the sun to light the greenscreens while we use various units to suggest ambience and sunlight entering the car itself. The lighting diagram is from memory; please forgive any inaccuracies:

My key light was a 10K through the front window half-topped with a silk to keep the faces softish while feeling harder light in the lower portion of the frame. (All of the following stills are uncorrected frame grabs with the shooting LUT applied.)

Erich Bergen in the back seat had his own special light through the side window which a grip would occasionally pass a solid through to feel some movement.

For the cross-coverage we brought in smaller, lightly-diffused units through the side which did double duty as edge lights and fill.

I shot the driving plates that were comped into the windows on a special trip to Washington D.C., as examined in detail in my previous post.
In the end is this cheaper than a process trailer day? Ask a UPM. It's certainly more controlled, which is nice.

Day Interior in a Windowless Basement

Indie filmmaking is entirely about doing a lot with a little. You’re not going to have the whole crew you need, the equipment package you want or the locations you’d prefer.

A scene in the forthcoming Walnuts The Movie was scripted as taking place in an attic space in the daytime, but unfortunately our single location (which was what made the movie possible and was very generously donated) didn’t have an attic. But it did have a basement. Without any windows.

If you can’t have daylight you need the idea of daylight, and an idea of daylight which fits the tone and mood of the story you’re telling. In this case we were already deep into surreality and psychological interiority by this point in the movie so it was much more important to produce an abstract feeling of daytime than to really sell the audience on the location being lit by a sunny (late afternoon sunny, in this case) exterior.

For the majority of the scene (looking this direction, there’s a relight for the reverse using the same gear arranged slightly differently) this came down to using two lights and a small number of modifiers.

The key light is an ARRI 2K tungsten fresnel fired into a large white bounce card (showcard, I believe, in this case), and the bounce source is cut with a single 18x24” solid. Then to create the light slash on the back wall I used an ARRI 300 tungsten fresnel and its barn doors, unmodified, to land the highlight exactly where it needed to be.

When we dropped back for Cat’s exit I added another bounce source powered by a dimmed ARRI 650 with 1/4 Straw gel clipped to the light in order to pick up her shadow side as she leaves the main area of action.

And that’s all there was to it! A lot with a little.

Many thanks to my gaffer Minu Park KSC and my grip Charlie Hager. Walnuts was directed by Jonas Ball and produced by Sarah Jo Dillon. The music in the above clip is by Tristan Chilvers.

Scene Breakdown: Madam Secretary ep. 507

This scene I shot as 2nd unit DP for episode 507 of the CBS series Madam Secretary serves as a decent illustration of what goes into a simple day exterior photographed with available light, so I thought I would walk through it briefly.

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The master setup, establishing the scene’s geography, the relationships between characters, and the color palette in one image. On the tech scout our series DP Learan Kahanov noted that the sun rose over the stands in the background so we planned our day to begin looking in that direction to provide a striking edge light and deep shadows to outline our subjects. This was shot at a T4/5.6 on the wider end of a Fujinon 25-300 zoom lens, which was the only lens we were budgeted to carry for the day (times 2, as we had two cameras for the scene), with a filter pack of a Formatt Firecrest True ND 1.8 to control exposure plus a soft-edge grad ND .6 to provide a little “Days of Thunder” feel from the top left corner of the frame. VFX would eventually change the signage above the characters.

Tighter coverage looking the same direction. Same ND, no grad. James is “keyed” by the bounce off the dragstrip he’s standing on from the intense sun over his left shoulder. For the color of the scene, I wanted the skintones to seem healthyish but the overall feel to have a kind of kerosene-polluted warmth; more red/magenta than I would normally go, to be evocative of a racetrack ambience.

For the reverse coverage of Erich, I didn’t want the harsh direct sun on his face if I could help it. For the tighter shots we pulled out the major piece of grip gear for the day: a 12x20 light grid diffusion frame. In the final version I asked the colorist to stretch the highlights a bit on both Erich and the background so the contrast shift wouldn’t feel so extreme when cutting back and forth between James and Erich.

Here’s a little behind-the-scenes shot of what it looked like to fly that 20x:

However, we had a problem in the wider shots of Erich.

One thing I did not know about the front windshield of a stock car is that it is raked backward at a very shallow angle, but we discovered while blocking a dolly move which revealed Blake that it was impossible to both cover Erich with the frame and keep its reflection out of the car. Another thing I learned is that the windows are polycarbonate, which made using our polarizing filter to attenuate the reflection impossible because of the rainbow moire interference patterns created when the filter was introduced. We minimized it as much as possible, but then got lucky to have a thin cloud layer roll in while we still had time to go back and reshoot the wider shot without the frame.

We didn’t get to the coverage of Usuki’s Assistant until that cloud layer had settled in, so in this setup I miss a bright back/edge light I’d otherwise want to be there to match what was established in the master. If this were a main unit scene with the electric truck available I might have asked for the gaffer to recreate that hot backlight, but alas.