The first test starts as a full-figure shot, with a line of tape on the ground for Gugino to follow as she walks into a close-up. In the test, her hair is her own, before she had it cut. The jacket is the one that she puts on during the course of the movie, to hide her bloodstained dress.
"This is just to see how her face takes hard light. So now you can see, we're lighting her with a--probably--a baby," say Burum. "It casts a very hard shadow. You can see the neck shadow. This is classic butterfly lighting, because the shadow in that little indent under the nose forms a little butterfly. This is a technique that was used with Marlene Dietrich."
Series 1, Take 3
"You can see that she's got pretty good cheekbones--you can see where the cheekbone breaks. She's also got--because she's Italian--little dark circles [under her eyes]." In the movie itself, Burum says, the position of the light was very important whenever Burum wanted to hide the circles under Gugino's eyes. "I would constantly say to her, if I didn't want dark circles to show, 'Carla, keep your chin up!' You notice how in all the old movies, how all the actresses are always looking toward heaven? Well, they're always looking toward the key light."
"I think we just pulled the hair off of her face. It's still the hard light, still the butterfly light. She has an eyelight in her eye. And all of this stuff has no diffusion."
(Series--In each one, Gugino slightly changes the angle of her face toward the light)
"This is with the Kino-flo. You can see that this is still more or less the butterfly position. You can still see the nose shadow." In this particular shot, Gugino looks directly toward the key light, with the shadow side of her face toward the camera. The darkness on the side of her face, explains Burum, makes the face look taller and skinnier, whereas it would look fuller if the light came from the other side. "What I'm trying to discover here is what her cheekbone looks like. And of course, she has these little lines in here [from the nose to the edges of the mouth] and you can also see the edge of the shadow on her neck, now that the source is bigger, starting to powder out. And you can also notice that she has an eyelight in her eyes, a kick in her eyes.
"This is again a Kino-flo. Now as she moves her face around, you notice she starts getting into the light we call 'half-and-half.' Now she's not facing directly into the light. What half-and-half does, is that when you cross-light anything, it shows more texture." He explains that this is a good sort of lighting to use to make the actress look more stressed, as she will later in the movie. "You get the little thing under the nose more defined, the dark circles are defined, and anytime anybody wrinkles their forehead, every little wrinkle is going to show up."
Again, Gugino moves her face, relative to the light. "You see, as she looks around, just by changing her look, how it changes the texture of her skin.
"This is the Kino-flo with the eye-light, only we're using the eye-light right over the top of the camera, actually for fill. You notice how we're picking up more detail in the side of the face. But it's basically again the half-and-half position. You can see the little bump in her forehead."
Series 1, Take 6
In this test, Burum says he was looking at the position of the light and the edges of the shadow. "This is a Rifa light--it's a big soft light. Lowell makes it. And now, it's almost directly over the camera lens--again, it's the butterfly position. If you put it off more to the side, you get more shadow. And it's very, very high."
The height of the light, he says, keeps it off the neck area. "When you shadow the neck like that, it pulls more of the attention to the face. It looks like I also shadowed the forehead here. The reason you like to shadow people's foreheads is because you want to look at people's eyes, you want to focus attention on people's eyes."
Series 1, Take 7
The soft quality of the Rifa light leads Burum to explain a little about lighting fundamentals. "The thing that really governs the hardness or softness of the look is the area of the light," he says. "A Rifa light is about three feet square. A Kino-flo is about two feet by four feet. It's a different area. And if you have a spotlight, it's maybe six inches in diameter. If you had a spotlight that was four feet in diameter, and you had it six feet away from somebody, and you had a big soft source that was six feet away from somebody and four feet square, it would cast exactly the same amount of shadow. The important thing to remember is, it's the area."
In the old days, he says, when only hard lights were used, cinematographers and gaffers controlled the look of the shadows by reducing the size of their lights when they moved in for tighter shots--from the subject's perspective, a larger light farther away and a smaller light close by appear to have the same area. "They would use a smaller light, because they would want to have the same kind of shadow. If you use a big light in close, it's going to change the characteristic of that shadow."
Series 1, Take 8-16
"This is a series of diffusion tests. And this is a Rifa light, in a modified butterfly situation. And she's looking off camera, into her key light."
As the series progresses, he says, the filtration becomes more evident (though it may not be quite as clear on a computer monitor). "See how even though it's the same light, it starts to diffuse her a little bit."
By take 16, he says, they've started work with her hair, looking for the right hairdo to use under her wig. "This is looking for a length--we're just working on the hair length and bangs now. This has heavy net diffusion on it, and it has a China ball. And now Carla starts to look like her character."
