Filming at an area with NO lights at night [the darkest hour] what to do? night scene

J

jeree

Active member
http://g.co/maps/e8a3x

Thats the area. At night I see nothing but moonlight casting on the ground. obviously thats not good enough for my 7D,
so i was thinking to bring one of my QL-1000 tungsten/halogen lights to do a rim light & use the available lights from inside/outside the car. but i dont know where to plug it in... there are no electrical outlets in the desert to power my QL-1000 lol...

What to do?! We are filming tomorrow night at 7 PM [and it gets dark here in winter]
 
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I assume you cannot shoot day for night. If your not recording sound, you could rent a generator. If you are shooting sound, then you have to rely on batteries. An automotive supply store might have a light that plugs in to your cars cigarette lighter. If you don't need to shoot for very long, you could even use a few of those large flashlights that take the square 6-volt batteries. But you might need some diffusion on the flashlights, since most have irregular coverage patterns. How large an area do you need to light, and for how long? Does this have to look realistic, or can it look like news video?

- Ken
 
12v halogen work lights and jumper leads from the cars?
Just be sure to leave the largest battery/car alone so you can jump start the other cars!
 
Yeah, you are going to need to bring your own power. Should probably get a generator. The Honda generators are not silent, for sure, but you can put up some sound baffles to cut them down quit a bit. I would make sure that you get good ambiance loops with the generators running, AND do wild tracks of all of the audio without the generators running, just in case (It is a good idea to do good wild tracks on any scene you do out side.... but that is just me).
 
Ken Hull said:
I assume you cannot shoot day for night. If your not recording sound, you could rent a generator. If you are shooting sound, then you have to rely on batteries. An automotive supply store might have a light that plugs in to your cars cigarette lighter. If you don't need to shoot for very long, you could even use a few of those large flashlights that take the square 6-volt batteries. But you might need some diffusion on the flashlights, since most have irregular coverage patterns. How large an area do you need to light, and for how long? Does this have to look realistic, or can it look like news video?

- Ken
Click to expand...

now that i think about it. I think large LED lights are the way to go. seeing as bring a huge QL-1000 light and some kinda of generator/inverter to power it will be a big hassle especially because ill be working with classmates who dont really... like to film/be patient.... I just need big LED lights as key and fills. Do you know any particular i can get from walmart?
also since LED lights have a blue tint to them, it would look moonlightish.
 
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Hi there,
I got a husky 180 lumen LED light that is really powerful that I highly recommend. It lasts about 3.5 hours on a single charge and it's about $60. If you've got the money, get a few of those and throw some paper towels on for diffusion- I know really cheap :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feZVf7CPHuY

the scene at 2:00 was shot with only that one light at a 3.5 aperture and 1250 iso. This is what I've done of my college portfolio film so far, so I just put placeholding music there instead of the shitty audio that needs dubbing. Hope it helps.
 
I would shoot with 12 volt batterys, power inverters and 500 daylight LED light panels.
You can shoot for hours with this kind of setup.
 
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