"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.

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.