Hey all,

I've been watching the excellent TV show "Better Call Saul", and in episode 9 ("Pimento"), there's a daytime parking garage scene with some really clever lighting:

Any ideas how they did that? It's pretty hard to get a background like that (bright sunlight) and foreground (mostly shadow) looking great in the same shot. The background is not blown out as I'd expect. So my first instinct is that they added natural-looking lighting on the actors, and a lot of it, to bring their level closer to the background level. It's clear that the foreground is not hit with hard/direct light, so I would think it's lit by a large diffuse source such as a china-ball/chimera or hard light with diffusion panel; but in the wide shot the levels look the same, and I don't see any such sources near the actors where I would expect it to be.

My second instinct is maybe they somehow brought the background level down. So maybe they used large rolls of ND material on the outside of the parking structure, covering the spaces we see the distance sunlit hills through, in order to stop-down those areas. Is that likely?

My third instinct is that maybe the background is fake, either a physical translight or a greenscreen. But to me this location doesn't look like a stage, it looks like a real parking structure.

Any ideas?