Roger deakins starting point to lighting a scene

Roger Deakins runs a forum on his website that he regularly interacts with. I picked this quote out that i felt was relavent to my dissertation and aswell to general professional practise because it allows me to understand that even for someone of his stature he still needs to break a script down.

As i am just at the beginning of my trade it's easy to think that someone like Deakins is able to pick up a script and get ready to shoot right away.

For my dissertation practical, i had to be disciplined and organise equipment, crew and locations. Its difficult to imagine the scale of a production that he works on.

http://www.rogerdeakins.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2417



Re: Lighting Technique
Postby Roger » Tue May 28, 2013 12:43 am

"My starting point is always the same and it begins with the script. I decide on the look of the lighting I am after for each moment in the script and, from that, for each specific set. Only having made that decision will I choose the kind of lamps, diffusion, reflectors etc. I will use to create, as close as I can, that predetermined look. These technical decisions need to be made with as full an awareness of the sets and locations as possible. That sound very predetermined but it's not really. Once I have a plan I can throw it away and I always allow myself a lot of flexibility on the day of shooting. Everything can change when the actors take the stage and the visuals may need to change to reflect that.
Today's lighting styles are, broadly, not the same as they were in the day of Murnau and Fellini. For a start the kinds of lamps that are used today allow for quite a different approach to lighting. Bouncing a lamp off a muslin sheet and getting an exposure would have been all but impossible with the kind of output lights used to have even with modern fast film stocks. Combine that with the slow emulsions of the past and the equally slow lenses and it is easy to see why lamps were shone directly onto a subject. Other than the technical changes the style of shooting has changed considerably. A fairly common practice today is to shoot with multiple cameras and to shoot for 'coverage' rather than for a specific shot. This impacts what the cinematographer can do in the way of specific lighting effects as using a soft lighting scheme is far more accommodating to multiple camera set up and allows for a quicker change around from one set up to another."