Beginner - DV lighting

[Laura Klein]

I'm shooting some stuff indoors with a consumer sony 3ccd camera and I don't want it to look amateurish. I don't have a lot of money to spend on lighting, are there any tips/advice you can give me? possible cheap solutions? we will be using a smoke machine to help give the sense of a steamy, mysterious nightclub, as well as candlelight...thoughts? thanks so much.

[Guest bigal]

usually those types of cameras will give you 2 filters, indoor and outdoor LED lighting options, and auto/manual white balance. so with all that, and having the camera on a tri-pod, you should be ok. and if you need more than that, basic floresents should work somewhat good if you have all those options on your camera.

[Chris Cooke]

usually those types of cameras will give you 2 filters, indoor and outdoor LED lighting options, and auto/manual white balance. so with all that, and having the camera on a tri-pod, you should be ok. and if you need more than that, basic floresents should work somewhat good if you have all those options on your camera.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

No matter what you do in camera, regular floresent fixtures will look like floresent fixtures. The only way to change that is to put filters over the floresents but even then they're not your best solution for a night club look. If you have a little budget, rent some par 64s. If that's even too much $, use some of your dad's halogen work lights. The color temp is about 2400k or so but that shouldn't matter too much since you'll white balance to those lights. Make sure that you backlight the steam or you'll never see it on camera. Color gels and diffusion really help make a production look better. There are very cheap solutions for these as well. Stay away from handheld shots unless the scene really calls for it. Even the shaky NYPD blue handheld camera work takes a lot of skill in order to look profesional.