I'm shooting a poor mans driving scene in a couple of weeks time, it's for an experimental cinematography unit that I'm doing for part of my film degree. My plan is to have the car appear as if it's driving down a street at night. For this I'll be using a soft moonlight key, along with various sodium gelled lamps, a mockup traffic light made up of 3 dedos with coloured gels, and various lamps swinging and swivelling replicating passing cars etc..
I want to do a practical lighting change as if the car has driven into a tunnel. I plan on just having everything on a dimmer, so i'll dim down all of the sodium lights, and dim up a side daylight balanced light shining into the car, with the addition of poly on the other side for fill light. This will be the ambient light from the tunnel, probably a dirty kind of daylight, for the cheap fluorescent look, i'm thinking like Rotherhithe tunnel in London.
My main question is that I want to achieve the effect of passing overhead fluorescent strips reflecting on the cars front window screen. I'm aware that this might be achievable in post, however for the sake of trying, I'd like to see if it would be possible to create this lighting effect practically. An idea I have is to use a single fluorescent tube (either a kino 1 bank, or a cheap shop bought tube) rigged above the car as if its on the roof of the tunnel. Then I would have a spark simple move a cookie along the light, and have the light switch off, then reset have the same movement again.
Just wondering if/how anyone has done this effect successfully in the past?
Thanks in advance for any replies, I appreciate the support on this forum a lot!