Lighting a hockey arena

[Thomas McNamara]

Hey everyone!

First off, this website has been a great asset to me and I’m very grateful to everyone I’ve learned from by reading threads.

So I have a commercial shoot coming up and one of the scenes has me thinking a little.

I have to light part of an indoor ice hockey rink. I say “part of” because we only are going to be utilizing half of the ice.

I’m attaching a few pictures of the location.

The look I’m going for is a soft top light over the ice that quickly falls off into darkness. The ideal to achieve that would be if I could afford to have a heavily skirted balloon light right over where the action is taking place. Then I could get a nice soft top light (with some upward bounce from the ice) that falls off from what’s outside the boards.

Seeing as I won’t have that luxury, I’ve been thinking of different ways of achieving that look in other ways. This is where I’m looking to anyone here for any kind of advice.

One of the techniques for emulating that soft top source that I thought about is having a couple 1600w HMI’s just off to the side of the rink (on the other side of the boards) shooting up into a bounce source (possibly a large piece of ultrabounce that we rig up to the ceiling). I’d have an additional HMI on the ground creating a consistent edge/backlight to the subject on the ice.

Would this work? I’m worried that two 1600w HMI’s up into the bounce source might not be enough coming back down onto the ice. The only other way of somewhat achieving the look I’m going for is by seeing what I can do with the house lights, which I’ll see about once I location scout. The main thing I’m worried about using the house lights is the potential flicker for when we’re going to be doing a couple high speed shots. But I’ll see if that’ll be an issue when I scout.

 

Any suggestions here? I’m very curious to hear alternative approaches to this lighting challenge!

[Robin R Probyn]

Do you have any control over the practical florries that are there over head..ie each row..? just switch on 3 or 4 rows above your area.. and let everything else go into shadow.. maybe have one row down the back on to give some depth.. would be the easiest anyway.. then you can show the roof too in a wide.. poor mans Skypanel s.. :)

[Albion Hockney]

I would try to work with the practicals if you can. I would go over and run some tests with your camera and cross your fingers its possible to turn off the banks in rows that work in your favor. A joker 1600 would be enough to get a bit of your edge, I would personally try to get an M40 though If I could as I'm guessing you want to underexpose your toplight while still getting a brighter edge light. Also nice to be able to option diffusion and get the light as far away as possible.

 

Lighting a space that big for soft top light is a big assignment. My guess would be more like at least 6-8 Lights (3-4 on each side spaced out) and something like a 20x20 ultra bounce would be what would be required to get soft and overall over half the rink - maybe you can do a 12x but it will be semi sourcy over a certain part of the rink. Sounds like a full day of pre-lighting. Rigging will take some serious time and you might want to think about controlling the light off the background with some skirting on the 12/20x. You could probably use standard 1200 HMI's though.

 

If i was in a place I could get my hands on light tile (not sure if an g/e house in Montreal has it) I would do a 12x of that stuff.