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lighting car ineriors at night


Andrei Butica

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Hi, I'm new on this forum and I'm from Romania, so I might sometimes wright badly in english, but I'l make myself understood, I hope!

 

I'm preparing a short independent film witch takes place in a Taxi around the city during one night. The money for this project comes from my pockets so there's not a lot of, I'm Trying to build some sources that I can feed from the battery, has any one of you done this before? are there any advices? Can I build some Kind of a Dimmer for a "passing light effect" something like "Night on earth"?

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if you don't mind some strange color try one of those fluorescents that plug into the lighter. plenty of pretty nice light for nothing. i'm toying with the idea of bulding a small white led ringlight for the same kind of situation. 12 leds gives you pleny of light. my only worry riht now is to get it even. they throw a very narrow pattern so you can almost see 12 little spotlights hitting the subject. there are tiny little reflectors as well as fresnels that mounts right on the led that i'll try next.

 

/matt

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There are a lot of small 12v lighting units (often used in interior design) that you can use to light the interior of a car. You can create your own little mounts so that you can tape or clamp them in various parts of the car. You can get dimmers for the lights or wave a small flag across the to create the required effect, You could also use 12 v fluorescents and use colour correcting gel on them. On one film I shot we rigged a slave 12v car battery in parallel to the car's own battery, just to keep the strain off the car's system. The Kinoflo car kit is great of you can afford it.

 

Best keep the lighting levels as low as possible, so that the outside street lights register.

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Another think that u maybe consider doing is that (if) you can rent a set of dedolights, they come with a car adapter so maybe u can hide one of them reflected on a white surface.Also they have a car mount in the case that u can clamp it on the car's lid.

Or just think of anything else that can be use the cars voltage...

Dimitrios Koukas

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Bun Dimineaze, andrea.

 

Look for a couple of car lights that fit in the cigarette lighter plug. If you can afford, flourescent lights are more efficient than anything with a filament, so try them first. If you have a "Metro" store by you, I would look there. They have flouro work lights that plug into a car lighter.

 

If you need to light the front seat from outside the car, what about a couple of those spotlights used for cars and boats? You will probably need to place diffusion on them, like 216 if you can get it, however anything will work. I think I would put them off-axis to the driver somewhat so he or she can still drive.

 

If you do decide to use flouro's, they will most likely have a different color than the warm filament lights, so you may have to test to see if you like the color.

 

If you are going to tape the lights to the outside of the car, use a paper "painter's" tape on the paint first, then use duck tape over that and the units, or strapping tape that is used to seal boxes, with the little strands of hemp in it.

 

Good luck with your project,

 

Mike Hall

Glendale, AZ

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For dimmers, I think I would start with a couple of Dacia or truck car interior lighting dimmers, or whatever they have at Metro. You will probably have to buy some wire and wire them yourself, but they should work for dimming.

 

The flouros cannot be dimmed, so only use a dimmer on filament lights.

 

You will probably want to make up a little control panel where the wires can stretch all over the car - so you can dim the lights from wherever you end up hiding to get the shot.

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Just thought you guys would be interested in this: www.zylight.com. Product won't be out until after NAB in April but it offers a new light for car interiors especially at night. Its dimmable, very soft output and you can dial in whatever color is (or should) emit from your dashboard. Green, dark blue etc.....

 

It will give you white light if you need it but usually at night the light emits from the dashboard. Colored....

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One of the best car night interiors that I can remember is in "Belly", directed by Hype Williams and shot by Malik Sayeed. It's one of the first scenes in the film, following the club robbery. It's all very dark and edgelit, beautiful and very real, one of the most interesting takes on how to shoot that kind of a scene, you should take a look at it if you get a chance.

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An easy way is to put on the actors lap a running laptop computer with the screen facing him. You can adjust the color by choosing what's shown on the screen. Nice diffuse light, but not really strong and definetly nothing for a ruff shooting day...

 

For that purpose I plan to build a unit with the Osram Planon, it runs on 24V DC and it's Daylight. Arri makes their Skypanels out of the Osram Planon.

 

If your shooting Carstuff in daylight as well, I'd recomment some Kinos or lightpanels. You'll have to compensate the strong outdoorlight if your shooting daytime...depends a lot on the color of car interior that will reflect some daylight, black or dark is worst...

 

cheers, Bernhard

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Hi there.

I worked on job once where the DP did an interesting thing with a night int. car scene.

He lit the car with daylight balanced kino's (4' 4banks around the sides/back and a miniflo taped to the sun visor) and got his look by shooting on Fuji 500 daylight stock. The man and woman in the car were colour balanced normal but the background was all over the place but looked great. The car was driving around central London so there was very mixed lighting everywhere outside - sodium vapour, neon, blue headlights, yellow headlights....

It really created a speparate world inside the car with this 'hot' night outside. If you're shooting on tape, then you can white balance off the daylight source in the car and get the same effect.

Look at the AC article on Collateral on their website. The taxi in that was covered in velcro so they could rig ELD panels wherever they wanted, supplemented by miniflo's. If you find a light weight light source this could be a good solution for you.

I've also seen cameramen use other vehicles with their lights on full beam driving around the action car to create interesting effects.

Have fun!

Edited by flyingpenguins
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