It’s Always Sunny in… Austin

Shooting outdoors comes with a lot of lighting challenges, even when it is just me talking to the camera while sitting at a picnic table. A perfect day on the lake where the sun is shining can produce terrible lighting conditions for filming. I learned that clouds are my camera operator’s best friend. For example, when the sun is shining behind me, the background is washed out and I look like a shadowy figure. When the sunlight is to one side of me, I look like a less dramatic version of Aaron Eckhart’s Two-Face villain in The Dark Knight. When the sun is shining directly on me, I look like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Our first attempt at shooting on location had perfect lighting conditions, because the sky was completely overcast. I was not really aware at the time that this defuse lighting was just dumb luck. Unfortunately, I was not able to use any of the footage we shot for other reasons, such as sound problems. When we tried again, the sky was only partly cloudy. At first, the sun was behind clouds, so the lighting was soft and diffuse. We shot some good footage and moved quickly to different locations around the school. But when the sun came out, everything went wrong. We found a large sheet of plywood to hold up next to the camera, so that at least I was not washed out in sunlight. It sort of worked, but I could not stop squinting. We decided to give up and try again another day.

Then, while driving home, a large group of clouds rolled in, so we made a u-turn and drove back to the school. We double-timed it to get back to the location of our last shot. Now the lighting was perfect, so I focused on getting a good take with my lines, as we still had two more scenes to shoot. Fortunately the clouds conspired to help us. After we finished the remaining scenes, we hustled back to reshoot the opening narration scene under the big tree outside of our theatre department. The lighting had been decent but not perfect before, so I wanted to try again. Of course, now that the light was perfect, there were tiny but very loud birds in the tree above me and a few young kids shouting on the nearby field as they played touch football. My camera operator asked the boys if they could play quietly for a few minutes, which they were happy to do, but there was no negotiating with the birds. A few stones thrown into the tree did the trick, although I must state that no animals were harmed during this movie! We finally got the retake I wanted, so we thanked the kids for their help, packed up and left excited to watch our footage.