Family escapes from house fire- how would you shoot / light?

mainstreetprod

mainstreetprod

Veteran
Tomorrow I'm shooting a scene where a family of four wakes up, discovers the house is on fire and exits the home in a panic. A key scene will be shot in this stairwell as they make their way downstairs (at night):

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I will be using a couple of fog machines to fill the area with "smoke". I want the family to look shadowy, recognizable mainly by shape and size, and I want to backlight the smoke as much as possible to emphasize it.. The photo shows the main angle I will shoot from, but I'm open to other possibilities. How would you shoot and light this scene? It will be nearly dark outside at shooting time.

Note: the window on the right is to an added on room, not to the outside. Equipment I have available includes 2 650's, a 300, 4 softboxes, china ball, 10' jib, slider, steadicam.
 
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I'd get your 650s on dimmers or better yet, a flicker box, and use them to backlight the smoke from the top of the stairs. It'll give you a bit of silhouette to help distinguish the individual family members on the staircase. Bounce the 300w off some beadboard (or something similar) for some fill.
 
Thanks, shooting light down the stairs was the tentative plan. The lights are Cool Lights CTM's and can't be dimmed, but I do have some scrims. Maybe shoot them through a slow running fan for flicker effect? Where would you put the 300 and beadboard?
 
same, sharp blueish light from moon windows) cutting trough smoke, reddish light from fire from top of stairs (very diffused in smoke).
additionally, you can wrap aluminium foil on a cylinder and put a light on it, then attach a grill motor to make the cylinder turn slowly, it will create nice fire effect reflection.
add a small neutral light from the camera to get the proper exposure and cut noise in the shadows, you will still be able to modifiy in post to get deep black and nice contrast.
 
A couple of other things to keep in mind, compression and banding. You are going to be underexposing a lot of areas, and depending on the camera that can get ugly and noisy fast. The smoke will create gradient banding if there is a lot of compression in your codec. DSLRs are not a great choice for this kind of scene unless you can go out to a recorder, or you have a hacked it for higher image quality.
 
nosys70 said:
same, sharp blueish light from moon windows) cutting trough smoke, reddish light from fire from top of stairs (very diffused in smoke).
additionally, you can wrap aluminium foil on a cylinder and put a light on it, then attach a grill motor to make the cylinder turn slowly, it will create nice fire effect reflection.
add a small neutral light from the camera to get the proper exposure and cut noise in the shadows, you will still be able to modifiy in post to get deep black and nice contrast.
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Great suggestions. I tried a lot of this last night in a test shot (location is my own house) and was surprised how much smoke I had to pump in before you could even see it. Instead of the aluminum foil on a cylinder, I hung a piece of ND gel in front of a light and blew a fan on it- worked pretty well. I have a little LED camera light I can use to help get exposure as you mentioned.
 
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visugeek said:
A couple of other things to keep in mind, compression and banding. You are going to be underexposing a lot of areas, and depending on the camera that can get ugly and noisy fast. The smoke will create gradient banding if there is a lot of compression in your codec. DSLRs are not a great choice for this kind of scene unless you can go out to a recorder, or you have a hacked it for higher image quality.
Click to expand...


I'm shooting on an FS700 , so 24mbs. The camera has been upgraded so I do have the choice of SLog2 if I need it. Looks like I may need to light the scene a bit more than I thought and bring it down in post.
 
Just completed the house fire scene and was pleased with what we got, will post a rough edit in a day or two. Didn't see a lot of banding despite all the smoke, I think I can work around what did crop up.
 
Obviously I am late and this has already been shot, but if the scene was not very long I actually would have just shot this during the day and given it a moonlight/night look partially in-camera (by setting WB to 3000k + shooting a stop under-exposed) and some further tweaks in post if needed. That shaft of light coming in through the 2nd floor could pass for moonlight coming in through the window and if I had to shoot this at night I would use an HMI to get that shaft and pattern on the wall anyway - so why not use free light if its possible.

For the rest of the interior I would use some tungsten light sources to raise the shadows and even out the lighting a little more, and other tungstens with some mixed orange and possibly red gels on a flicker box or dimmers with crew manually turning them up/down. A fog machine would also help seal the deal on a nice and realistic effect.

aaf753ac-b84e-49de-8039-4a47070cec2e_zps454b91f6.jpg



Anyway it will be great to see how your rough cut turned out, cheers,
 
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Here's the roughcut of the fire scene, with a 30 min edit, quickie day/night CC and some placeholder music (file may be processing). Suggestions for post work appreciated.




Setup: A young boy gets up to read in the middle of the night, using a candle, and accidentally sets a fire when he tosses it in the trash (this scene not yet shot). Family wakes up and escapes , he goes out back door while they go out front to meet fire dept. Boy realizes he caused all the trouble and runs away. Dad realizes boy is not with them and runs back in.
 
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I'm not sure the flickering light on the kid works, you might want to add more orange light to the overall scene in post, perhaps some flickering on the trees to to match the boy. The roto should be pretty simple.
 
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