Search the Community

I'm DOPing a short film this week, just got back from the first shooting day of 4. It's a drama/thriller short film set in one house, for the duration of one night in the world of the narrative. The main rooms we are shooting in are small bedrooms, and a tiny bathroom. Today I had one of those days where I wasn't happy with any of the shots, I knew why I wasn't happy, but I just couldn't figure out 'how' to fix the shot and make it the standard I am always going for. I'm guessing I'm not alone with this, like anything in the world, you have good and bad days. For example, one of the scenes was a tiny 8x8foot (if not smaller) bedroom, of our main actress on her laptop whilst laying on the bed. With the kit I have available, I was able to raise a 2kw blonde just high enough from the exterior to light the room, which is on the first floor. This usually works for me for larger rooms, however with the room being so small, the light was just thrown and bounced all over the place. It would be interesting to figure out how you would light a similar scene? If you could have any lighting kit what would you chose to do this? Another scene I struggled with a lot was a day for night scene in the small bathroom. We had to tin foil all of the windows to cheat that it was night time, which meant I could only light from the interior. There isn't even a way of getting a light into the bathroom from the exterior even if we were shooting at night. The bathroom was fully tiled with white shiny tiles, so whatever light I had in the room just bounced everywhere once again. I went for a blue gelled LED to give the bathroom a blue tint, and the 2kw with CTO 1/2 on the landing outside the bathroom, to create some colour depth when the bathroom door is opened by the character. Once the character was in the bathroom, her close-up was just flat/boring in terms of lighting. I tried adding a warmer LED to add some contrast, however even at the lowest intensity, this was bouncing everywhere and creating even flatter light on the subject. Absolute mayhem! I guess it would be interesting to hear about similar experiences, and maybe how you solved them.

Hi everyone, this is my lighting set-up for a short film I did back in the day. It was an interesting 15 hours, stuck in a little crowded room. In the particular set-up that I have illustrated, 4 - 100 W lights were used enclosed in aluminium cones to give us a spotlight effect. We didn’t want to set up a large light as it would illuminate the whole room and eliminate the contrasts, however we did have a 500 W in behind one of the walls with a grill in front to emulate sunshine peeking through a window. Yes the 500 is extremely low to simulate sunlight, but we didn’t want to blow out the scene with the sun rays if we used a 2K or an HID. The scene shown in A1 was kind of tricky, because the lights where about 7 feet off the ground, and when the talent got up from the horizontal position, they where suddenly half way from the light source creating some hot spots. In order to resolve this we re-shot the scene with some diffusers. During the entire shoot there were frequent repositioning of lights except for the 500, which stayed in its spot. The lights where the clamp type 100 W. Since we were very restricted on space with no room for any sort of light stands this was very convenient. If anyone has ideas on how this could have been lit in a different manner, I would appreciate your input. This would not be the last small set for me to light and film in but at the end of the day it’s these challenges of filming in difficult areas that make our lives even more exiting. Happy filming. Izik Nox.