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NIGHT EXTERIOR - Can't measure


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Hi all,

I'm going to shoot a short movie next month and I'm here to ask some advice about a night exterior scene I will have to light.

I will be shooting on ARRI D20 with Zeiss Set (this particular scene will be shoot with a variable prime 50-105mm zoom T2.2)

The main problem is that scene involves a special FX and we will need all the night of shooting and I won't have even a minute after dark for measuring with the meter or to retouch lights.

 

The scene takes place in a square and a road going trough that square (imagine a wide rectangle and the road starting perpendicular from the longest side of that rectange). A man will be walking out of the square in the middle of the empty street and we will do a dolly shot from front, a little faster than his walk speed, going from a close up to a mid wide shot. we will have about 100meters (about 300feet) of streets+square in frame at the end of the shoot.

 

I can hide some fixtures in the square because there are some quite high buildings that hide it as seen from the street, and the street have arcade with big pillars on both sides.

 

My first idea was to light the "classical" way, with an HMI (maybe 4K sunpar) hidden just behind the corner of a building for a bluish moonlight backlight, and add a tungsten fill in front of the actor near the camera line (warmer or orange for a streetlight look).

 

This is the "safe" version, but I feel there could be some more interesting setups I didn't think of :P

 

Can someone help me out with the problem of metering everything and to come out with a more "creative" setup ?

 

P.S: Forgive my terrible english :)

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Not sure how you are going to light and balance the lights during the daytime and then not be able to adjust the lights or meter them once it gets dark, however, the camera itself is a meter and you can get away with just basing the exposure on the monitors and any tools like a histogram. But that won't help you balancing your artificial lights to the scene.

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