Lighting a factory

[Juan Pedriel]

Hello,

Next month I will be shooting a short film in Super 16mm 500t in a factory with an old green fiberfilter roof that stained the whole place green.

For this project i have a good amount of tungsten light with lots of diferents ctb and a pair of kino flo 4 bank.

My question is if i should add to the lights a plus green gel or another green gel to "match" the colors to then color corrected in post?

thanks

[Miguel Angel]

If you have the time and the resources to shoot a 50ft test to see how well you can match your lamps to the light of the existing factory, I would highly recommend shooting those tests and then you will be able to match everything in camera and you will save that step during grading.

 

However, with an environment like that and without knowing anything about your short-film I would ask the art department to place some tubes on the walls with a different colour to that of the existing factory (let's say orange for the tubes for example) and maybe try and light the characters using that colour :)

 

Have a good day.

[Landon Hill]

If you are going for overall evenness in the color of your lighting, then match all your sources to the existing factory lights. Tungsten sources with CTB with +green and daylight tubes in the kinos with +green. The amount of green will depend, but if it's green as it looks in the photo, my guess would be anything from 1/2-full +green. Then you can remove any green cast and correct your color in post if you wish.

[Bruce Greene]

I'm with Miguel here. Have the art department add some lights that are a different color, and match to those.

 

I recently shot in a very very large abandoned factory. There were some windows, but it was raining and very dark inside. I had the anticipated this and asked the art department to bring me 10 work lights from the home depot, and I placed them to suit the scene. We were shooting daylight and I let the tungsten lights go very warm.

 

I actually only used one "movie" light to light the entire factory and it was a 1.8k HMI bounced off of a white card. I didn't have much choice as I had a total lighting crew of 4 people, and lighting the factory with movie lights was out of the question for time, money, and people.

 

I hope my example frame will post.