Here’s our recreation scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho:
The worst struggle we had while shooting was to darken the background, which was the metal door. We could not recreate the scene exactly because the garage was really tiny and had a different structure than the basement in Psycho, so we decided to make Lila Crane appear from the dark. We spent a long time adjusting the lights with ND filters and eventually we had two layers of ND filters to bring it down. It was a hark task because at the same time, the light bulb has to be in shot as well and has to look over-exposed. So when we try to make the light bulb look over-exposed, the background was not pitch dark and the metal door was revealed. So in the end we had to settle for a not so blown out light bulb but the background was fully dark.
While recreating the shot in which Lila Crane walks towards Mrs. Bates, we originally tried to light Lila Crane from the front, her face would look nice but then the background was not dark enough, we spend the longest time trying to get the shadowless lighting on her face with the background maintained dark. Eventually we decided to light her from the sides. We used a 1K on the left of the frame with 2 ND filters on and 2 DEDO lights on the right of the frame. So here we had a shadowless Lila Crane and a fully dark background. Because we wanted the background to be dark, we couldn’t cast as much light as in the original scene. if we had gone with the strong lighting, the background would have been lit as well.
Another big problem was that when we’re filming the shot where Lila Crane is shocked by the skull and swings the light bulb above her. We realized that with the lighting set up we had, the lighting coming from the light bulb was not strong enough to have the shadows on her face as it swings. We thought about attaching a DEDO light onto the light bulb but we were running out of time. In the end we turn down the intensity of the 1K a little and settled with a dimmer lighting on her face with a relatively more obvious swinging shadow.
Dan made a Floor Plan of the project that explains our set up.
If anything could have been done better, it’s the pre-production. We should’ve had a look at the space before we did anything. Even though we had pictures of the garage to look at, we couldn’t estimate how big the space was. But in this case we’re lucky to even got the garage to use. Since we had no idea how big it was, almost all the decisions on lighting and set up were made on set while we’re doing it. And it really slowed down the whole process. We spent about 5 hours for the whole filming and the final edit was 45 seconds. If we had had more time on pre-production and on location-scouting, production would have been a lot more easier.