Horror Short Film - Tungsten & Moonlight

[Bradley Stearn]

Hey everyone. I'm DOPing a short 4 minute horror film in a couple of days time. Just a last minute thing that I've been bought onto. It's a basic story with two characters in a house, with a few jump scares, a fairly standard horror. It's going to be set at night, so we will be tin foiling windows and blocking daylight from every room we are filming in. With the long days in the UK right now, filming during darkness isn't really possible. The script calls for the scenes to be lit mainly with practical lamps which is great, the production team are thinking a lot about the right kinds of lamps to buy for the sets.

 

I'm planning to shoot at a kelvin of around 4000-4500k, as I am planning to light our actress with tungsten, and have moonlight spilling onto the backgrounds when possible. Not for every scene, but wherever that mixture seems right. I've tested a lot of moonlight combinations, and have never been happy with full CTB on tungsten for moonlight. I plan to buy some moonlight blue gel from lee filters, and will be using that on some daylight kino flows as background/set lighting.

 

My main question is, is there a gel that will make a daylight kino seem 'inviting' to the audience, a nice warm tone that works well on a pale skin tone. Would a gel such as Bastard Amber work in this instance? I'd like to try something different than just putting CTO on the lamp,

[Bradley Stearn]

Also has anyone used the Lee filters Moonlight Blue gel before? What are your thoughts on it?

[Albion Hockney]

if you want a warm tone from a kino why use daylight tubes?

 

I'm fairly conservative with colored gels myself. I think I would just consider how simple color is IE You can go warm/cool and everything else is just green/magenta shift. So I would just think do you want any green or magenta in your sources and then add some from there. I think tungsten looks great on skin tone when you shoot at yea around 4-45k kelvin.

[Bradley Stearn]

The kit is coming from my university, and the kinos only come with daylight bulbs. I appreciate the reply Albion. I'll probably stick CTO full onto the kino (Because of the daylight bulb situation) and use that as the base.

[David Mullen ASC]

Full CTO on a daylight Kino just makes it tungsten-balanced -- you want white moonlight?

 

Also, if you are shooting digitally, why set the camera to 3200K balance? You can leave the daylight Kinos ungelled and select whatever color temp on the camera that gives you the amount of blueness you want.