DM: With bright sunlight it is best to first start by walking outside and looking at what’s going on in the real world. Not just reading about it, but actually looking and figuring it out. Our light source, the sun, is very, very small and very, very far away. There’s not much light falloff going on since the sun is 93 million miles away. The other side has to be lit by some sort of ambient skylight or bounce light off of something nearby. This ambient light has either no shadows or very faint shadows on the fill side. Your key light, which is very strong, and maybe 5 stops underneath that (a stop is half the light) is how bright the fill side is. The color of that space also plays a role in determining what the ambient light sources contribute. In combining the CG with the background, your lighting must be from roughly the same point of view as in the background plate. If the shadow needs to follow the contour of something the character’s walking by or the ship is flying over, that needs to be there, too. The shadow also needs to have all the same characteristics as the fill side of the character. It has color that’s based on the environment, but without the sun. It is important to be attentive to those things. I spend a lot of time just looking outside at how the world acts and works. This is one of the important things that I’ve done. There are books on the subject, but it sure doesn’t hurt to go out and look at the world. Also look at paintings. Impressionistic paintings are really good because of the methods used for studying light. When looking at those paintings, you can see what you can get away with and still have shots look good or even better than if you did it technically correct. First you’ve got be able to get it to look real. If it’s appropriate, you can cheat it to look better than real and pull your attention to the character. In Jurassic, in that first shot of the Apatosaurus when it walks up to the tree and starts eating the leaves, we cheated the backlight on it (see Figure 1). The plate is shot very top lit, which means that the whole top of the dinosaur would have been lit up all the way down his shoulders and his underbelly would have been dark. When we did that, it just didn’t look very good. I knew since most of the other stuff was so small in the frame, we could cheat the light back and give it more of an edge light. That edge light made it stand out and look much better. These sorts of cheats are okay as long as the audience doesn’t know what’s going on or see it as fake. It’s good to try those things, but you have to know when you can get away with it.

[Figure 1] A dinosaur with light coming from behind to better identify its outline in the 1993 film Jurassic Park. All Jurassic Park images © 2002 by Universal Studios. Courtesy of Universal Studios Publishing Rights, a Divi

DM: For underwater lighting, a good example is the underwater sequence in Episode I. We didn’t want the underwater scenes to look like they were in outer space. One of the ways to prevent this is to make sure things are kind of hazy. It’s important to have sort of a fog effect so that things fade off into the murky distance. The trick is how much murk, because you’ve still got a story to tell. It is important to balance it so you can at least see the setting, but not have it look like outer space or crystal clear air. Another way to do it, as well as having the murk, so it doesn’t look like it’s in fog, is to add little particulates floating around like little bits of debris in water currents. It’s nice if that stuff actually has a current to it, with direction. It’s not just floating, but it’s moving, so you get a concept of a large ocean current moving it. It makes everything look a lot more realistic. In addition, you can put little caustic type rippling effects if you’re not too deep in the water. This helps remind you that you’re in the water since you see the water ripples on everything. Another thing you can do is have your camera be like a hand-held type camera. Include a little panning and tilting, because most of the underwater footage we see, probably 99% of it, is shot handheld. This means you’ve got a little panning and tilting going on, but you also have camera roll happening all the time. By introducing those three things into it, you will help tremendously in giving the audience the feeling that they’re seeing something that’s shot underwater. Something as simple as just adding a roll to the camera can make a big difference. If you’re doing something that’s at nighttime and dark, then you need to establish some sort of light to start out with. It may be the moonlight coming through clouds, because with a storm, it’s probably very cloudy. It’s always nice in nighttime scenes to edge light something with a rim light, so you can identify the edges of the subject. The front of it can be pretty dark and pretty mysterious. Some of the shots with the T-Rex breaking through the gate and roaring in Jurassic are good examples. There are mainly two things going on in those shots. One thing is there’s a little edge light on it, with the front side being really dark and mysterious. The second thing is there are a couple of eye lights in there eyes and not the rest of the model. When the dinosaur roared, we put a little light in its mouth (see Figure 2). It was a very weak light. The audience isn’t even aware that they are seeing a light, but their eyes are drawn to the danger, which is the teeth and the jaws. That’s what you want to emphasize. There’s a weak little light source in there all the way through Lost World to make those nighttime scenes look really scary.