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How did they light this...?


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Hello! Trying to get my head round 35mm and how it works in low light etc. Came across this music video. Some of the later shots in it seem to be lit only by the practical lights in the street. Would this be possible? Or are they boosting the light somehow? What stock might they be using for something like this? Any thoughts much appreciated!

 

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There is "optimal" exposure and just exposure, so yes, you can shoot with available light and it looks as if they did just that in a few shots.

One of the shots looked like they had a warm gelled portable light providing some fill to keep from totally loosing facial detail.

Vision 500 would probably be a good stock, but get to know a good colorist for your grading session!

I have shot film where there was no real key light, but there was illumination somewhere in the frame that the actor can walk in and out of pools of light and was amazed at the latitude of even a slower film stock.

It all depends on the look you are going for...

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7 hours ago, Joshua Silverlock said:

Hello! Trying to get my head round 35mm and how it works in low light etc. Came across this music video. Some of the later shots in it seem to be lit only by the practical lights in the street. Would this be possible? Or are they boosting the light somehow? What stock might they be using for something like this? Any thoughts much appreciated!

 

Yes, this level of exposure is possible with 5219 500T film stock and a fast T2 or T1.3 lens.

The only truly ‘low light’ scenarios here are the night exterior alleyway shots. Where her face is full lit for a large area of sidewalk, it looks like there is a separate mobile key light on here  on camera right. Probably something like a handheld LED Litemat on a battery or similar. Otherwise, you can see how dark she gets at times, when she is just lit by the ambient street lights.

Re: testing on the cheap

If you want it try it out on the cheap, get a 135 roll of Cinestill 800T (5219 with anti-halation backing removed) and shoot in a cheap 35mm SLR stills camera. That will give you an idea of what exposures are possible at the required shutter speeds.

Here are some of my Cinestill 800T frames from NYC in some of the same areas that this music video was shot, taken on an old Pentax MX 35mm stills camera with a 35mm f/2 and 50mm f/1.4: https://satsukimurashige.com/play

The shutter speed was usually around 1/30 or 1/60 for the dark interiors and night exteriors since it was all handheld. With a motion picture camera at 24fps/180 degree shutter, the shutter speed is 1/48, so in the ballpark. You could make up the exposure difference from 1/30 with a faster lens or adding more light. 

I did take some stills at 1/15, which would be the equivalent of 8fps, so you would need to add a significant amount of light to those areas to show up on film.

Re: other options

You can also push the film stock a stop in the lab - it may help make the dark exposed areas of the frame brighter, at the cost of more visible film grain. But it won’t add extra shadow detail that wasn’t already captured by the film to begin with. 

If you want to get really creative, you can do as Christopher Doyle did in ‘Chungking Express’ and lower the frame rate to increase the shutter speed, then ‘print back to 24fps’ (or for digital post, set the playback speed of the scanned file to whatever frame rate you shot at). This will create a trippy motion blurred effect, but the speed of action will be in real-time rather than sped up.

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