Shooting night sky full of stars

[Joydepghosh]

Friends

 

Please help me out to understand how to shoot a star stuuded night sky , with a character in foreground/ mid ground...The camera tracks through a corridoor to an open balcony where the character is sitting on a chair, camera stops at midshot of the character beyond whom we see the night sky full of stars. is it possible to do that without compositing or DI ? Though we have seen films where it was done and it was much before the digital era.

 

I will be eager to know the solution

 

regards

 

Joy

[Patrick Neary]

Hi-

 

Before the digital era there were still opticals :)

 

I think it would be next to impossible to expose stars in the same shot (without very slow frame rates, very fast lenses and very fast film!), unless it was Venus straight ahead on a really good night, but even then....

 

I just shot some stills of a pre-dawn street scene, and the exposure was something like 1/4 sec at f2.0 (iso 200 or 400), and there was one star (probably venus, I know, technically not a star...) that did expose, the rest disappeared.

 

The beauty is that we ARE in the digital era now, so that shot is very possible, and probably not very difficult to pull off!

[David Mullen ASC]

Pre-digital, it would have been an optical printer composite using dupe elements, and since the camera is moving, probably it would require motion control in order to create a plate that matched, though I suppose it could be lined up frame by frame on an animation stand.

 

If it were a lock-off shot with just a black sky in the upper half of the frame, it could be done with simple in-camera double-exposure of a starfield artwork (usually just black card with pinholes poked in it, backside covered with diffusion gel, and backlit.) But if someone crosses through the stars, then you need to create a travelling matte and do a composite. And moving the camera makes it even more complicated.

 

If your name is "Joy Depghosh" then please edit your Display Name under My Controls to make that more clear. Thanks. Display Names need to be a first and last name, not one word.

[Leo Anthony Vale]

If your name is "Joy Depghosh" then please edit your Display Name under My Controls to make that more clear. Thanks. Display Names need to be a first and last name, not one word.

 

Also don't double post.