Creating Rain & having it register

R

raffaele16

New member
On our production we plan to rent 1 or 2 500 gallon pumps to create rain. I think making it won't be a problem, but having it register on camera will. Using DVX 24p w/ anamorphic adapter.

Any tips, suggestions, or comments on how to go about lighting and shooting this scene?
 
I've seen milk added on two features. Don't know the mix, but it seemed to work. Backlighting would be my second suggestion. Anytime the water can fall around a practical light fixture like a street light, the better chance you'll have.

My bet is that adjusting the shutter speed up or down will elongate or shorten the captured drops.

e
 
experiment with shutter speeds too. you can get the drops really isolated with faster speeds. for the really exaggerated isolated raindrop look, like they used to do with sweat on the gatorade commercials, they lit with strobes synced to the shutter speed.
 
You always want to light rain from the opposite side of the camera. So if your camera is facing down an alley, the light illuminating the rain should be at the other end of the alley towards the lens of the camera. Do that and you'll have no problem seeing the rain.
 
I recently did this with the DVX and had much better results than expected. The real trick was backlighting the water... I also put ctb on the lights to give it a nice color effect. I can post vids if you're interested (PM me).
 
Once compressed these ended up rather dark, but this maybe this will help:

This is basically a 1k tota with ctb and a spray nozzle garden hose.

:smiley_do Rain

Next is an exterior house shot. On this production there was no way I was going to get a night shot of a house this wide WITH rain, so this one is a cheat. The "rain" was shot as its own element and composited over the house in after effects. The lightning is also a simple brightness/contrast adjustment in AE.

:smiley_do EXT House (really short clip)
 
Those look great. I can see the first clip pretty well, and the cheat looks good. I do have a wide shot (not as wide as yours) but I wonder if that is the way to go. How did you shoot the rain element by its self. In front of a dark background?
 
Yeah, at night against black so that ONLY the water showed up. It works pretty well as long as your shot is locked down.

I had another shot that needed rain but was a hand held pan. I had to watch playback of the shot and try to match the move when shooting the rain to be added in later... not fun, but worked in a pinch.
 
Owen--
I bet you guys had a ball making those films. What a great novel series to repurpose into movies.
Congrats on the completion of the them.. well, the first couple anyway! Brian
 
It has definitely been a lot of fun -- having a series of 36 books to draw from makes for a great creative resource.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top