Harry Potter and the Cursed Child BTS
Last year I had the pleasure of creating some images for the Year 2 cast of “Harry Potter And the Cursed Child” on Broadway. We were asked to create family portraits of each unit as well as some individual shots, all with the idea of soft lighting.
The name of the game was diffusion. For our key light, we used a 7-foot Westcott parabolic umbrella powered up but feathered away from our subjects to create incredibly soft light. That was further softened by shooting it through a giant Scrim Jim. We positioned our light sources as close to the subjects as they could be without being in the frame, as the larger the source in relation to the subject the softer it will be. With just that source we had a gradual transition from highlight to shadow, but I knew we needed to soften it even more. (I always look at the nose shadows cast by my key light to get a sense of how severe of a transition from highlight to shadow.)
In came our fill lights. Instead of just using a shoot through umbrella pointed at the subject, we used a shoot through umbrella pointed into a v-flat to make our source even larger. To take it one notch further we also used a shoot through umbrella pointed at our 12-foot Oliphant drop to fill the shadows being cast by the bodies of our subject.
It all took some fine tuning of light powers to make sure that we still had shape to the light. If only it was as easy as saying “Lumos.”
