film noir?

V

verlaine

New member
i'm doing a film noir spoof, using a dvx. i did something similar before, using film but i'm worried that video will just look grainy in low light instead of giving nice shadows. any way around this?
 
Yeh, noir doesn't mean low light. I shot somewhat of a noir film last year. We had some very low lighting in the room, but we used a 250w key light pretty close to the talent. They for us was to kill all top light and position the key at eye level to the talent, cutting sideways, to create a good contrast from light to dark side. Shot the film at F2.8, so a decent stop and no gain was used. There is a still here.
 
Cheesesailor77 said:
yeah, don't use low light. Most would say Noir is identified by high contrast and harsh edges. You need lots of light to do that.
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And you forgot to mention the shadows. That is every bit as important as the light. Flag off everything that isn't central to the scene.
 
Capt Quirk said:
And you forgot to mention the shadows. That is every bit as important as the light. Flag off everything that isn't central to the scene.
Click to expand...

Exactly! Start with darkness and build up from there only what is essential.
 
The true key to noir, was the way they would light the eyes, and almost everything else was either secondary lighting, or shadow. It was always just a strip across the eyes.
 
You should read Painting With Light, it's written by the guy who invented film noir lighting back in the day. He tells you how to do it, how to do a lot of old school Hollywood lighting. It's like $20 @ Amazon.
 
To answer the earlier question you probably had too much grain because you were using too much low light. Like everyone said before, high contrast. Also you'll be using more of what's in key and complete darkness instead of what's in key / shadows / and darkness. Kinda cutting out the middle area. Less or no fill.
 
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