Recreating "Belly" Intro Blacklight Scene

[Roger Alexander]

At the beginning of the movie Belly, the bad guys walk into a strip club in slow motion under strong blacklights. I want to recreate this blacklight look, shooting on RED Raven (dragon sensor) I know I will need alot of light for this, and blacklights are already not very bright. Looking for advice on lights bright enough to recreate that where I can either move them backwards in front of talent as they walk forward or maybe have several of them placed overhead down the path the talent plans to walk. Ideas? Are there any super strong black lights I can rent? Or maybe is there a blacklight gel I can throw over an HMI to get the same effect? I will be shooting this weekend in New York so looking for answers fast!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRaN7wB85a4

 

Thanks

[Adam Frisch FSF]

Malik Hassan Sayeed - very good and for me influential cinematographer from the music video days. Sad he seems to have given up shooting features and mainly stayed with commercial work.

[Reggie A Brown]

I always imagined that lighting was done with some really strong ctb and coloring in post. Not so sure it was actual black light. Black light will pick up too many small (and probably distracting) nuisances like lint on clothing or in hair, but with gels that wouldn't be noticeable.

[Phil Rhodes]

I think there's at the very least a strong contribution from very deep blue light, which is what's making the contact lenses glow.

 

You can get something like that with Lee's #181 "Congo Blue" filter. There are banks of fluorescents in shot - possibly Kino-Flo Wall-o-Lites, given the period. They look to me like they have the bluescreen tubes in them, although it could just be a quirk of how blacklight tubes are being rendered.

 

There are UV-emitting LEDs these days - Zylight have a UV-emitting version of their F-series LED fresnels.