Lighting for sunflowers music video

Dorian Quell · March 16, 2004

im making a music video for the everclear song "Sunflowers". If you've heard the song it'll make this easier. Im shooting it on DV with a GL-2. It will be primarily focused in a room with dark sheets covering the walls and natural looking sun light pouring in from a large window. I want the shots to look dark yet with streams of light coming in illuminating things. I dont have any pro lights to work with. I have regular lamps at home and a few things i can use for diffusion. In this room during the afternoon, which is when i will be filming, the light is usually like this. I plan on gathering up some more equipment tomorrow.

So any tips on capturing these kind of dark sprawling light shots?

and any suggestions on what equipment i should grab that i can get locally? perhaps at a hardware store.

thanks for anyones help. Any tips also on things to use for diffussing light would help. Note: I'm not a cinematographer so i will most likely not understand the termonology. break it down if u can please.

thanks guys.

Malinko · March 16, 2004

You mentioned you wanted to "see the rays of light"? In order for light to be seen it must reflect off an obeject. To capture rays of light I would suggest getting dust fragments, like chalk dust or somthing put it in the light and then record it.

Michael Nash · March 16, 2004

Well, if the natural light looks right to you then you're half way there. Try to get your widest shots while the available sunlight is in the right place, then try to recreate that light for the closeups (since the sun will eventually move).

The sun is a very bright, hard source, so you'll need an instrument that can put out that quality of light. Fresnels are best for this, but you can also get a pretty crisp shadow from an open-faced light. You'll need something with a lot of wattage to emulate sunlight. You'll likely be using a tungsten-balanced light, so you'll need to either gel the light with blue to make it match the sunlight, or re-white balance your camera to the tungsten light (make sure there's no daylight spilling in when you do this).