Lighting a bed scene

[Laffrey Witbrod]

I have a film coming up where I want to do a birds eye shot of two people laying in a bed looking at each other. It should feel dark and we are not going to have the practicals on next to the bed. I would love to hear your guises thoughts on ideas for lighting the scene or examples of shots like this that you like.

 

Thanks, love this community and all of the sharing of knowledge!

[Satsuki Murashige]

Here's a similar shot I did for a web series a few years ago.

 

 

 

We did use a practical to motivate the lighting, however I had art get a red bedsheet and we wrapped it around the lampshade to get a softer quality and add color. The girl in our story was supposed to be a floozy, so the red color was thematic. We added a white card on the wall on frame left and pounded a 420w fresnel into it with some flame red gel to augment the practical. Focal length was 14mm.

[Adrian Sierkowski]

One thing I'll often to is throw a Kino up close to the ceiling to bounce off and give an overall ambience-- blue for moon-- though I hate that color-- and from there use something smaller, maybe even a Kino 2' single to model a bit and give some definition-- often through something like opal to soften her a bit (2x3 thereof) just off of screen.

[Mark Kenfield]

+1 to Adrian's approach.

 

My starting point for a 'nighttime ambience' is always to simply bounce a daylight fixture off the ceiling or a corner of the room, see how that falls and then tweak from there.

 

Here's a recent scene I lit using that simple technique:

 

[Laffrey Witbrod]

Thanks for the thoughts and examples, the shoot went really well.