advice for Lighting

Kris Mckay · February 28, 2008

I am shooting a short film that is a western/pioneer story. I came from the location yesterday in the High Desert of Oregon where I took raw stills of interiors. A large window is in every room and it was really bright enough that I've decided to shoot vision 2 250D for day interiors as well as exteriors. The script does have night interiors and oil lamps and candles is all they would have used. Any advice or help on how to artificially light for this??

Also advice for shooting Exteriors in dry, flat, vast tumbleweedy terrain?

The rooms are ok size but will be wide angle for sure.

specs:

Arri sr2 super 16

vision 200T or ?

Optar Illumina glass

Kristian

Dorian Soracco · February 29, 2008

The script does have night interiors and oil lamps and candles is all they would have used. Any advice or help on how to artificially light for this??

For the night interiors, I would go for a warm, under-exposed key (1/2 to 1 stop under) with a key-fill ratio of about 8:1. I would also recommend a lot of fall-off using nets/flags to subtly boost the accent on the subjects, motivate realistic candle lighting, and create vignetting in the corners of your frame. Maybe use black wrap or a snoot over your lighting units to better focus the light and reduce spill on unwanted areas. I would also suggest playing with a cool moonlight raking across certain parts of the set or subtly backlighting characters. This would be a harder light with a light CTB or steel blue gel.

Kevin Mastman · February 29, 2008

To get the look of lighting from candles or lanterns I would recommend using lights on a flicker box with CTO or straw and lighting the walls or the talents' faces with it. I just got off a set that was lit entirely with "candles" and it worked really well.

Paul Bruening · March 2, 2008

You could probably get a few dozen recommendations on how to pull that off, here. The main thing is: what will the viewer accept as an appropriate reality of that scene's lighting? I've used a single, gelled fresnel with a guy rolling his fingers across the light path. It worked just fine.