Continuous Lighting on a Car

[Casey Friend]

Hello,

 

I am shooting several videos for a client and it revolves around a vehicle. I've done extensive research and found mostly advice given for photo shoots, meaning non-continuious lighting. The point of the video is for education purposes only, meaning it isn't supposed to be look as good as Avatar or a great blockbuster, but we want it to look nice. It is being shot indoors in a 20 x 20 foot space with a ceiling of around 10-12 feet.

 

The lighting setup I have so far is this.

 

We have 10'x20' white backdrops that are going around all four sides of the vehicle. This will help show only white on the reflections of the body of the car and the reflections in the window. We are also going as far as adding a white sheet on top so we cover the ceiling and diffuse any light coming in.

 

I have a 1K bouncing off the passenger side wall and allowing spill onto the back of the car and helping create a background light (I can use diffusion on that if necessary but I feel diffusion + a bounce could get to be redundant. I have a second 1k bouncing off the wall behind the camera and allowing fill light to come onto the driver's side of the car. (where most of the video will be shot)

 

I have a 1K Soft light blasting through an egg crate and possible diffusion as a light to aim at the vehicle from the side so the vehicle and person in the shot will have a nice light on them.

 

Lastly, I have two (2) 650s that I can use as little kicker lights to emphasize a specific point or put into flood and act as more light bouncing from certain angles onto the part of the car we are going to video.

 

I figured, if anything, that I'd rather have more lights that I can turn off/diffuse then to have too little of light and need more. We'll be using DSLR with video capability, so I figured we could drop down on aperture to maybe a 5.6, 8, or even 11, depending on how much light is shining and reflecting and this will increase our DOF so that more is in focus. Also, I've been doing research on polarizers so that we could keep reflections from the window glass down to a minimum. I've only read about using a CPO outdoors against the sun; would it work indoors for lighting equipment and indoor light?

 

I appreciate any and all help.

Thanks,

-casey