Lighting a 4 person setup in studio

[Torben Greve]

Hi

 

So, I'm shooting a job next week on our in-house semi seamless background.

 

Cameras: 2 (3)x Canon 5D3, would love to not go under F 4.0 since the shallow depth is a bit too much for me below that for this situation.

The setup is 4 girls discussing a topic, seated in a couch and two chairs.

The film will end up being in black and white, but I would like to light it as to get a slight drop off of the light from the girls to the background, to make them stand out.

As you can see on the photos, we have quite a few rigging options, but I havent really figured out exactly what to do with lights.

 

If keeping in mind the above; could I get a result like that by rigging up two space lights over each two girls? Maybe a bit in front of them...?

I imagine the space lights would be easier to control and still give a relatively pleasing light. How powerful would you reckon those would need to be? And even with the space lights would I have to light them with another light? Maybe a fresnel relatively high up doing a sort of key for the one group while slightly rim lighting the other and vice versa.

 

Or is it more feasible to rig up the 4 x 4 metre silk we have in an Arri frame and then hang a couple of blonds shooting down?
This I imagine would force me to work a bit more with skirts and so on, to get some sort of drop off?

 

Would love to hear other ideas!

 

OH... the large light hanging in the ceiling is a soft box made for still life flash, so I'm not sure it would be able to handle the heat much less fit the fixtures inside :)

Cheers

[Torben Greve]

Or should I just rig up our stills lights and turn on their pilot light? They are 600w each, so I could probably get around 2400w inside that box.