Low budget backlot horror feature: Schedule and Lighting Strategy for an all night single location

[Sergey Zhelezko]

I am to DoP a two weeks Horror/Thriller on a studio backlot on a very tight budget. We have a deal with the local rental house so I should be able to use most of the available lighting equipment.

The location is a 2 story suburban house (living room, bathroom, corridor, a couple of other rooms, basement). The movie takes place throughout a single night. There is one EXT scene. Some scenes need to look through open doors or windows into the night. I’ll have from 2 to 6 characters max in one room (mostly 3-5).

Since we’ll have to shoot 7-8 pages a day, my strategy is to light the space (with practicals) and then tweak for each shot (bring in a lantern or china ball for example for closeups). I’m planning to strategically place practical lights throughout the house and set up astera bulbs in them to be able to tweak color and dim them easily.

My biggest concern is how to schedule this. Blackout the windows or shoot nights as much as we can.

My initial thought was to shoot as much as possible during the night (it is summer, so I really will get 7-8 hour of darkness outside) and use the rest of the hours to shoot scenes with minimal windows locations (basement, corridor, bathroom etc.) I’d most likely be able to set a couple of Skypanel s360 (or a 12K through a diff) on a lift of sorts outside and have a consistent moonlight exposer for outside the windows as well as being able to adjust and add additional lights for the windows when the lights switch off inside and we get some splashes of moonlight on the floor/walls (I usually use those splashes as a motivation to bounce for fill for closeups etc). If we get the s360s set up during the pre-light day, it sounds doable even with the minimal crew.

But keeping the whole crew and the actors up all night for 2 weeks sounds brutal even from my perspective, you can image what the producers will think if I push for this.

My second option is to blackout as much as possible and shoot the majority of the movie during the day. I’d build blackout tents for some windows to get some moonlight in (especially for scenes where the electricity is cut off). It sounds a bit more complicated as there are a lot of windows in this house so if I have 3 windows on one wall I’d have to have 3 tents with lights mimicking the moon.
I guess the best solution is to do both. Blackout (no tents) as much as possible and shoot everything possible with the windows being black (w/ light curtains or blinds where possible) during the day. Then have something like 4-6 hours during the night when I fire up the s360s and face toward the windows that will have to have EXT visible. If I had to make a decision right now, this is what I would go with.

One other concern that kinda overlaps with everything. Let’s say I have the porch blacked out (not just the window, but the whole porch, and there is a porch light that we see throughout the movie), then at some point we look out through the porch window and see a person in the foliage (w/ s360s lighting the foliage and the person) standing 50 feet away from the porch. So when we cut back in and that window appears in the frame one way or another, wouldn’t it feel inconsistent not to have the foliage lit? Meaning we only have the tungsten porch light, then look outside and see the moonlit person and the foliage and then cut back in with the window only having the tungsten porch light. Am I overthinking this? Or should I have some sort of small light (e.g. astera tube) to light the duvetyne to just barely bring in the moonlight color to it? So it doesn’t really do much but gives a little of that color on the bg out of focus?

 

Setup: Venice 1 (it's most readily available) which give me extra room in exposure with 2500 base iso and internal NDs, s35 sensor mode w/ Ultra Primes T1.9 (the plan is to stay T2.8 - T4). Two weeks, minimal crew (my team will be 2 ACs, Gaffer + 1 Electrician, Key Grip only, potentially +1 grip TBD).

 

Let me collect all the questions in one place:

1. Schedule. Full nights, daytime blackout with tents, or the hybrid split I described above? Where do you actually wrap on a sustained low budget night shoot, and do you run consistent split calls or rotate? 12h days // 2pm - 2 am sounds like a plan?

2. Blackout. If I black out windows, should I always build a tent for the air gap between glass and duvetyne, or is bare duvetyne sealed to the frame fine when the window only needs to read black?

3. Porch continuity (and window continuity in general). Am I overthinking the lit foliage vs. black window cut? Small light on the duvetyne to carry the moonlight color? Should I do the moonlight on duvetyne on all windows where applicable (physics and continuity wise)?

4. Bulbs. Astera bulbs throughout the practicals, or tungsten 100w? My worry is dimmed tungsten turning into a color temp mess across the house, but I want a sanity check on a macro budget.

 

Any comments or input would be greatly appreciated!

[Aapo Lettinen]

I would probably try to use normal cheap construction scaffolding and black painted plywood to build larger "permanent tent frame" outside the windows and then throw black molton and waterproof tarp over it to seal the light leaks and block light from the longer side which needs to be opened for setting up lights. So there is a fixed frame outside the windows which is already partially blacked out all the time and then you fix the rest with molton and tarp. Much easier to manage with minimal crew. Tenting everything with actual cine gear like frames etc is for moving production, if you stay in one location all the time it is easiest to build something permanent if you can with cheap materials and only move stuff which you absolutely have to.

This way you can also setup some tree branches and such behind the windows fir the whole shoot and shoot most of the stuff both day and night. Only if some lighting setup takes tons of space it would be necessary to open the backside of the tent and schedule for night shoot.

For int lights, yes some fixed adjustable practicals and then having movable battery powered lights which can be tweaked shot by shot. Like astera tubes with softboxes, led mat lights and such, all battery powered to move quickly