“This was my intro into not thinking about key and fill like a dummy, mostly thanks to suggestions from our gaffer Gilbert. This scene had a big wash of warmer-sodium light coming from key side, and then a police light gag playing as a backlight. This was in 2016, so southern AZ didn’t really have m18’s or skypanels or anything like that yet.
Their key was an Aadyntech Eco Punch across the street punching through 8x ½ grid. It was a little funky but a good light for it’s cost. We didn’t have a color meter to accurately check it, but it read a little green to the eye, also it is HEAVY, and the falloff is more intense than I would have expected. I think we were metering at about a 4-5.6 from roughly 20-30 ft away at 2000 ISO. I think in hindsight I could have done a better job shaping it on/off the street, but still, it worked.
For fill we had fat man kinos more on axis with the front of the car punching through heavier diffusion like 216. Those we were metering at closer to a 2-2.8. And like I said earlier, this was really the first time I had the scale to work with filling from the key side. I always thought of fill as an ugly light you put on the wrong side of camera, but really it’s more about wrapping it naturally from the key side. Obviously there are exceptions to that and I’m pretending to know what I’m talking about, but this setup was a nice learning experience for me in that regard, and I was happy with how it turned out. For the police light gag, we had two leko’s gelled red and blue firing up into shiny boards that would manually be spun during the shot. Bouncing them seemed to mimic the ambience of police lights more than just raking gelled lights across the scene.”
-Symeon Platts, Director of Photography