As the scene progresses, Derek sits Anna down and explains to her that he has been hired by her boyfriend to “dissolve” the relationship. By the time we got to this coverage, night had fallen.

The front wall of the location has three windows, but I explained to director Neese that I only had enough fixtures to light one window and the inside. We adjusted the composition so that the actor was squarely in front of one of the windows and the other two were out of the shot. I covered the outside of the window with an opaque white shower curtain and lit it with the 650W from about four feet away, covering primarily the lower third of the window that would be seen in the shot. This created a hot, bright white world outside the window that passed for natural daylight.

To continue this feel, I used a 150W high and behind Mark to get hot light on his shoulders, as if coming through the window. I used the second 150W off his right shoulder with some 250 diffusion to continue that “window” light around the right side of his face and create a hot 3⁄4 back edge. Finally, I used the 300W into a 3' x 3' piece of white foamcore that was positioned low, about his knee height, to create the soft key bounce as if it were coming from hot natural daylight reflecting off the floor onto his face. I snuck in a Litepanels Micro on top of the 7D to get a little glimmer in Mark’s eyes.

The same technique, roughly, applies to Lisa’s coverage in this scene, except that she’s sitting opposite the window, so I eliminated the hot edges. She’s lit from the 300W bouncing into the 3' x 3' foamcore as her key, again low, and the 150W with the 250 diffusion high and off her left shoulder for fill.

The confrontation comes to a head and she leads him to the door, where he pleads with her to succumb to reason. For the two-shot here, I stretched out the white shower curtain on the floor and bounced the 650W into it from behind Lisa.

I double-dutied the 650W by opening the barn doors and making sure the edge of the direct light also hit the bookshelves and door, to mimic the feel of natural daylight through a window behind them. The hotspot of the light is focused onto the shower curtain and lower part of the door to reflect back on them as a low-side key. The camera side is filled with the 300W into the ceiling to provide a base “room tone.”

This same technique tracks into the close here, with Lisa’s main key coming from the floor and lower portion of the white door to her right. Her left side is filled from the 300W bounced off the white ceiling and, again, I put the Litepanels Micro on top of the camera to get the sparkle in her eye.

Lighting with a small kit is definitely a challenge but entirely doable if you’re careful about how you use it. The additional trick to this particular look is to keep the keys as more backlights and, when possible, on the off-camera side. I rarely use low-positioned sources as key sources, but sometimes it can create really beautiful light.