is control a good thing?
INT. CAR - DAY …. 5 page dialogue scene. Good luck.
Happy Easter everyone. I will just preface this by saying, “I won’t be going into technicals about this so I implore you to go and read the ASC articles” BUT I wanted to show you guys two examples of sim trav/poor man's process and why one is better than the other.
For those of you that don’t know, you have a few ways of doing an interior driving scene and really it comes down to budget. You can do:
Process Trailer - This is a lowered trailer that mitigates the height discrepancy of a regular trailer to the road by being much lower and therefore when the car is sat on, you have a much more believable road height. So you can light and shoot the car whilst it drives along. If safety is the name of the game then you're in luck.
Rear Projection - This encompasses both VP (Virtual Production) and traditional rear projection as it is overall the same concept. You have a controllable lighting environment in which you can see, in-camera the background outside the windows. This requires you to create in Unreal Engine or go out and pre-shoot your background or side plates with the angles, photometrics, lenses, height and settings as your shots that you will shoot later. Can work great but sometimes can be a bit “cart-before-the-horse”
Poor Man's Process - A controllable environment in which you light for but ultimately you are shooting into a green screen outside.
Just Drive - So this is a very Robert Rodriguez thing to do, just strap the camera to the car and get the actor to drive…..not encouraged….but I guess sometimes you gotta do what you got to do.
None of these are easy to be fair, and all come with their own challenges but in my opinion I love to process trailer work as you are dealing with real environmental interactive light on your subject and you can fill in or soften that. BUt the challenges of this can become very frustrating:
You are dealing with an ever moving sun and sometimes you can’t find a road to shoot on that is perfectly straight so you will find your sun moves around the car.
The reset time of that trailer will kill a lot of time out of your day so you are almost better shooting multiple cameras so you end up losing control of the lighting a bit but you get the shot so I guess thats worth it.
If you are shooting the scene over multiple days then you are at the mercy of the weather and its cruel shifts and changes you will likely have to over prepare, i.e get a big M40 on stand by on the back ¾ of the truck in order to kick it in when the sun disappears.
Safety. Although it is the safety, your load in and safety briefing will also really cut into your day with stands needing to be secured, people harnessed in and cameras mounted to the bonet or onto rigs,
MISTAKES:
So this brings up one of the key points I wanted to make. Mistakes are good. The more I have done these breakdowns I have discovered that so many people when lighting every days scenes throw in an international mistake just to help it feel more real. Lighting in the real world is never perfect (or at least rarely), it falls in odd ways, you have a sun beam coming through one window but not the other. These things are what help the very intelligent audiences believe in the lie and build that complete verisimilitude. Just listing the things above I even said that if you were to shoot two cameras, you won't have perfect lighting…and maybe that's the trick. I feel like the unsuccessful car sim trav work I see that pulls me out of the film, just feels too perfect.
I speak about successful and unsuccessful sim trav and process trailer work not from a place of snobbery but a place of sheer amazement and people who do it successfully. I believe now in my career that I can accomplish this to a fairly high standard but only because I have failed abysmally at all of the above techniques many times earlier on in my career.
So now to the origin of this article. I am always looking for better examples and techniques as sim trav/poor mans process is so difficult and I went to watch “Drive Away Dolls” shot by the amazing Ari Wegner who did such and amazing job but the thing I was floored by was to learn that the sim trav was green screened on a small little stage. What makes her’s so so seamless with reality is that she hasn’t over lit it. She has taken the same approach to lighting a car interior as we all strive to do with lighting a window of a day interior. She has broken her light sources down into the classic:
(have a look at the trailer below, the sim trav is at the end - couldn’t get high res enough stills of it so thought it best to put the trailer)
TOP AMBIENCE - Existing soft, sky top light.
SUN LIGHT - Sun light source behind car.
ROAD BOUNCE - This is the coolest one that really fascinates me. She has implemented a road skip bounce with a less saturated tone on to bead board. You could even place a grey muslin or grey card on top of your beam bounce to help with that road skip.
That road bounce is so clever. I always find that the thing that stands out to me the most and is a dead give away for me that it was shot in studio is that harsh contrast under chins and really just a lack of bounce back off the floor of the road and hood of the car. Car lighting should be a little flatter frontally as you have so much that is lit up, especially if your sun source is behind the car. Of course you will then have a lot of flat bounce back from the world ahead.
To light the greenscreen, Wegner’s crew set up Arri SkyPanel S60s and hung a 12'x12' Ultrabounce above the cars to form a sky, which was illuminated by Arri M40 and Creamsource Vortex8 fixtures. For bounce, bleached muslin and beadboard on the studio floor were lit by SkyPanel S30s and Arri M18s. Wegner varied the color temperature of the sky and ground, depending on the location and time of day of the scene. A soft, warm backlight was added for Florida scenes. “As they drove south, we made it a bit more sunny, but not so sunny that you couldn’t also use it with an overcast plate — a possibility we had to allow for,” notes Wegner.
- From Feb 15, 2024 Feature in ASC Magazine
I think some of the other things that help create that feeling of honesty is camera position. There are never any shots that feel like you couldn't achieve them on the road. So the camera is hard mounted to the bonnet or on a hostess tray, there are no unrealistic sweeps or things that just would never be possible.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
The hard thing about a comped background as well is that you need to pop the windscreen out of the car. Cars always have a replication of the sky/scenery ahead (dependson the angle of the shot) but if you were to project a plate onto the windshield, you wouldn't be able to do a clean green comp on the background….so….you do what Ari did. Pop the windscreen and add it back in post later….if you can.
Last lighting thought. I like that they have put a double black net (1 stop) over the place where the windshield would be. One thing will observe a lot in real life is that someone's hands out on the steering wheel will be significantly hotter than their face and leading to over exposure and all that fun stuff, so a solution is to put a net over that spot ino order to minimize that exposure difference so that the hands are a little brighter but nothing that is too distracting.
SO….I know at the top of the article I said we would look at two examples but we’re not. I like this one and I want to be truthful with you…I often don’t know where we will go with these articles aaaaaannnnndddd this is where we are…..sooooo…. Yep.
Bye bye - got chocolate to eat.