A few lighting ideas

[Gohanto]

Like most people I'm on a budget like most here and I thought of a few cheap lighting ideas I wanted to see what people thought of.

Shooting in a pre-light area at night (parking garage in my case). I want to use the natural light, but everything looks too flat without adding my own lighting. Would buying a 8' x 6' piece of duvetyne, hanging it on a backdrop frame (2 stands with a bar between them), and then just putting that to one side of the actors work for getting noir style shadows?

Would there be any potential problems with bending a long metal rod in two places, and then stretching duvetyne over it to make a cheap and light cutter (pun not intended, but will go with it anyway).

 

[Cool Lights]

What you're really describing is known as a flag and they're quite common. So its not unusual at all to use something like that. I'm not totally sure what you're describing on your other comment though about getting "noir style shadows"? Can you describe better what you want to do with the black material to one side of the actors?

 

[bcheong]

Shooting in a pre-light area at night (parking garage in my case). I want to use the natural light, but everything looks too flat without adding my own lighting. Would buying a 8' x 6' piece of duvetyne, hanging it on a backdrop frame (2 stands with a bar between them), and then just putting that to one side of the actors work for getting noir style shadows?

I think what you're thinking of here is "negative fill". This might help in remove so of the flatness that you're describing depending on how much ambient light there is and the overall direction of everything in the parking garage.

Noir style lightig is generally hard direct lighting with sharp shadows so you probably still need some hard sources coming from somewhere in your frame.