Lighting for School bus interior?

[booggerg]

What kind of lighting setup would you guys recommend for the interior of a school bus? This is a daytime scene so I assume I'll need some sort of lighing in the interior to make up for the strong light coming from outside.

[Mike_Donis]

If you could get your hands on some ND gels - you could do the reverse, and darken the light coming in from outside. If you're not wanting a stylized effect, cutting down the intensity of the outside light may be all you need...

[xort]

Will the bus be driving or stationary?

[booggerg]

It'll be moving.

I'm really going after that high-contrast look you see in a lot of hip-hop videos. Are you guys aware of any DVX productions that have this look?

I'm excited to come across the Britek posts and those lights seem like great solutions for our low budget production. What do you guys think?

[gcaus]

Yea, just test your Briteks by running them for 10 hours straight before a shoot...

-Jerry

[xort]

As already mentioned, consider ND gell for all windows in the shot. Lowers the overall exterior levels, then you can use smaller lights inside. 4' 2 bank kinos up high might be a good choice or perhaps a few small HMI's. All depends on the types of shots you are doing and the budget.

[Dan_Lahav]

you also have to think about how your going to power the lights

[GenJerDan]

The DVD of Jeepers Creepers 2 show the shots being done inside the school bus. Nothing specifi like "Here is our lighting setup....", but you can get ideas..

Dan

[Multi-Media]

Perhaps you might consider conversion filters instead of ND filters... like 85B or equivalent... That way you could use smaller tungsten lights instead of HMIs or the like... or you could just get blue bulbs or filters for the lights depending on what you want to balance to (the daylight or the artificial). One drawback to the gels on the windows... you can get reflections between the space between the glass and the filter and also if there are any wrinkles... you may see them also. If the bus is moving you may not want to do filters.

[J_Barnes]

As a word of caution, the windows in schoolbusses are designed to be kicked out in the event of emergency (usually), so it won't usually be very safe to secure any lighting or grip equipment to the windows or frames.

You could rig this sort of set up very quickly using autopoles and baby spud clamps of various ilk for a down-and-dirty setup.

[xort]

As for using 85 nd gel. I would only gel the windows that are in shot and let other windows illuminate the scene. That illumination will be very blue so the gel should only be nd and any lights will have to be daylight to match. gelling EVERY window on the bus would take more time and cost ambient light.
Yea, wrinkles are a real big pain to deal with. there are plexiglass panels that are very thin and won't wrinkle anything but your wallet.

[j]

>>>>As for using 85 nd gel. I would only gel the windows that are in shot and let other windows illuminate the scene. That illumination will be very blue so the gel should only be nd and any lights will have to be daylight to match. gelling EVERY window on the bus would take more time and cost ambient light.
Yea, wrinkles are a real big pain to deal with. there are plexiglass panels that are very thin and won't wrinkle anything but your wallet. <<<<

The above advice is solid. Having shot a lowbudget feature (w/ a DVX) on a bus, I have tried several of the mentioned methods. Gelling the windows on the "set" side of the bus it by far the way to go. Get the darkest gel possible. n9 at least. Don't worry about wrinkles or reflections of gels (least of your concerns) Yeah it takes time to gel the windows, but it takes just as much (if not more if change the lighting set up for each shot) to set up lighting.

If to do it again, I would gel the windows, and fill w/ a 2' 2 bank kino with day globes powered by an inverter off the bus motor. We tried putting a genie in the undercarraige, and even with the smaller 1k genie we were getting sick from the exhaust leaking in thru the body of the bus.

Also, think about any lighting rigs you build. Now imagine the set being picked up by Zeuss and shaken violently from side to side, up and down, forward and back. So any lighting rig takes even more time to compensate for those forces. What ended up working the best for us was using the 2' kino for fill on a c-stand, hand held in place by a grip. Shooting on a moving vehicle takes a tremendous amount of time, so anything you can do to simplify will save *everyone* grief. You might even end up making your day...

for more info, you can check out my production journal with frame grabs, behind the scene shots, and lighting diagrams:
http://emrl.com/j/greydog/

I go into plenty of detail of the trials and tribulations of shooting on a moving bus. Try non-drowsy Dramamine!

Best of luck,

-J