Base exposure & toplight with spacelight?

[Guest Matti Poutanen]

I´m DP'ing a short chidlren's movie, with child actor. Because of the limited working hours per day, I want to light the whole set so we can shoot pretty much everywhere we want with minimum light adjusting, so we can move as fast as possible.

 

My question concerns our living room set. I want it to be pretty high key, so I´m planning to use a space light (2000w) for base exposure and work it from there with other fixtures. The room is about 5m x 5m, with 2,40m wall height, and the warehouse acting as studio (we don´t record sound when shooting, it´s a stop motion style "animation" with human actors) is 6m in height. I´m planning to hang it to the center of the room set.

 

I've not worked with spacelight before, and I thought this would be a good chance to experiment eith it. Being overall ambience and all, I want it to be soft. I think I´ll get a little toplight to whole living room as well, which would be ideal. I will augment this with additional hairlights and kickers, the look is going to be little stylized. It comes with a skirt which will be useful if I want less light spilling to the walls, yes?

 

Will a single spacelight in such a small set work? Will it be soft with the 6m height? Would bouncing units from the floor to little frame over the set, say 8x8 with some white in it, give better results? I figure controlling the spill would be tricky with this method.