Lighting Talent in Moving Car at Night

[Ryan Fleet]

Alright I've been doing lots of reading and really feel this forum is the best place to get the answers I need.

 

I'm shooting a short film that mainly takes place in a moving car at night. Very hard thing to do for a Film Student on a 1200$ budget, I've come to find out. We did some tests and realized that we are going to need a well lit street. We found one and did some tests then realized not enough light was getting on the actor, so we switched the vehicle to a convertible. This made the shots a lot more interesting and created a lot more light for our talent. Here are some location/storyboard shots

 

 

Here is a Photoshoped photo of the rig we will be attempting to use. This to us seems the most plausible, without the trailer we would have a car driving around with something obstructing the view of the actor. I'm sure this idea for shooting is still illegal but we think it might be less illegal, than just a car and camera mount, if that makes sense. Basically we are trying to pull this part of the film off in 1 night from 10pm to 6am on a Sunday night, without the need to shut an entire street down.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ifleeter/8755013241/sizes/l/in/photostream/

 

For the lighting we were thinking of adding a 1.2K HMI to the back of the truck and making it really soft to light up everyone in the car a bit more. What ways can we go about lighting the actors better without using dashboard lights or anything small. We don't want it to look like there are lights on in the car. We are using a Sony FS100 with Rokinon Cine lenses, I'm sure we would be able to get away with shooting it natural and bump the ISO up. But we really want to make the light look as best as we possibly can with what we have.

 

Lighting equipment we have----- (2) 1k Fresnel and (1) 1.2K HMI and a lowell light kit.

 

Is there anyway we could make this shooting rig safer as well as less likely to piss the cops off. The street we are filming on is 30mph so it's not a highway or anything.

 

Thanks for any help or advice you can give me.

 

-Ryan

[Johanan Pandone]

You could have the director sitting in the back of the cab with his monitor, instead of the truck bed (that would be the easiest thing to cite you for the cop)

[David Mullen ASC]

Fast lenses, high ISO, convertible, street with a lot of street lamps... then you can use mostly available light. You can augment it with some soft frontal light that fades up and down a little to add to the movement, but it should probably be warm like the street lamps, and be able to be dimmed up & down or flagged softly on and half-off. It doesn't have to be very bright.

 

No one is going to like spending time in the bed of a pickup truck with a small gas generator... I'd almost use one or two 1'x1' Litepanels and camera batteries on them, they have a dimmer knob in the back.

[Iain Browne]

My experience on the LOW end- I've used very small LED panels (such as these http://www.filmtools.com/li56flpamolp.html) on suction cups mounted to the car, near the rear view mirrors, and gotten ok results. They were dimmed VERY low. Shooting on a T2i, 30mm 1.4 lens I believe. Terribly compressed YouTube image, but it's all I got at hand.

 

 

I've also used christmas lights plugged right into the car, you can get battery powered ones as well. Litepads also seem very viable, but I don't have enough experience with them to weigh in.

[Lance Soltys]

A long time ago, I think around 1993, I shot a low budget feature on 16mm, where half the movie takes place in a cab at night. I got Superspeeds (though the Rokinon cine's are just as fast) and we were able to get KinoFlo tubes (which had pretty much just come out I think) that we tapped on to the sun shades of the car, if i remember they plugged into the cigarette lighter. We also dialed them very low so there was still a lot of play on the actors faces from ambient light. Then we rented a big suction-cup mount and stuck it to the hood with me roped on the hood also. We drove pretty slow, so it wasn't all that dangerous, and we towed the car. One thing to think about is sound (which is one reason we were moving so slow). Do you intend to have dialogue during this? That could be a problem with the convertible and generator. We had our sound guy crouched in the back seat. Keep in mind, with the boom mic pictured as you do, you might get bad shadows. The overhead street lights cast long, repetitive shadows of anything over the head of your shot. By the way, we shot like this for four or five days in Chicago and the police never bothered us. Just lucky I guess.

[Ryan Fleet]

You could have the director sitting in the back of the cab with his monitor, instead of the truck bed (that would be the easiest thing to cite you for the cop)

 

Yeah after I posted we had a meeting and decided to get rid of them in the back of the truck.

 

Thanks for your reply!

 

-Ryan

Fast lenses, high ISO, convertible, street with a lot of street lamps... then you can use mostly available light. You can augment it with some soft frontal light that fades up and down a little to add to the movement, but it should probably be warm like the street lamps, and be able to be dimmed up & down or flagged softly on and half-off. It doesn't have to be very bright.

 

No one is going to like spending time in the bed of a pickup truck with a small gas generator... I'd almost use one or two 1'x1' Litepanels and camera batteries on them, they have a dimmer knob in the back.

 

I was thinking we might be able to get away with available light but \the Litepanels seem like our best bet. The generator is going to be a problem and we don't want people in the bed of the truck anymore. We just need to get the directors monitor battery powered.

 

Thanks for your reply!

 

-Ryan

My experience on the LOW end- I've used very small LED panels (such as these http://www.filmtools.com/li56flpamolp.html) on suction cups mounted to the car, near the rear view mirrors, and gotten ok results. They were dimmed VERY low. Shooting on a T2i, 30mm 1.4 lens I believe. Terribly compressed YouTube image, but it's all I got at hand.

 

 

I've also used christmas lights plugged right into the car, you can get battery powered ones as well. Litepads also seem very viable, but I don't have enough experience with them to weigh in.

That looks great! I really think we are going to go the Litepanel route and suction cup them to the hood.

 

Thanks for the help!

 

-Ryan

A long time ago, I think around 1993, I shot a low budget feature on 16mm, where half the movie takes place in a cab at night. I got Superspeeds (though the Rokinon cine's are just as fast) and we were able to get KinoFlo tubes (which had pretty much just come out I think) that we tapped on to the sun shades of the car, if i remember they plugged into the cigarette lighter. We also dialed them very low so there was still a lot of play on the actors faces from ambient light. Then we rented a big suction-cup mount and stuck it to the hood with me roped on the hood also. We drove pretty slow, so it wasn't all that dangerous, and we towed the car. One thing to think about is sound (which is one reason we were moving so slow). Do you intend to have dialogue during this? That could be a problem with the convertible and generator. We had our sound guy crouched in the back seat. Keep in mind, with the boom mic pictured as you do, you might get bad shadows. The overhead street lights cast long, repetitive shadows of anything over the head of your shot. By the way, we shot like this for four or five days in Chicago and the police never bothered us. Just lucky I guess.

Wow if the cops didn't bother you guys with someone on the hood, I hope we don't get bothered. Is there anyway I could see some stills from that feature of the car scene, I'd love to check them out.

The audio is going to be a problem. I was thinking of having Lav Mics hidden in the car or on the actor's and also having a sound guy in the car on the tight shots, with the wide shot we might just have to go with the Lav's.

 

Thanks for your help!

 

-Ryan

[Torben Greve]

Consider using directional lavs? Omnilavs tend to pick up way more than you often want. But ofcourse, if you don't mind that ambient sound in the background of traffic etc. then omnis would be fine.

And put them on the talent....