How would you light this?

[Rafe]

I'm planning a shoot within the next 4 weeks and I'm trying to figure what would be the best arrangement of lighting for what I'm trying to accomplish. It will be a night shot, though if I had to shoot for day, you probably couldn't tell much differently.

1) The talent all have medium to darker skin tones so I want to use warmer colors, and granted the lights available are already pretty warm I'm not sure if I'm going to need to compensate with temps closer to 5600k...or fall in line and use more in the 2700k - 3500k range. Maybe the lighting would even be sufficient to just bounce of off? Space is going to be at a minimum between the orange lighting and the talent so it may not be of benefit to try and mix color temps to add depth/separation... Maybe?

2) I would like to use flos because they can be placed in more convenient places very close to the talent - and this will be a short location shoot probably no more than an hour of footage to be taken. But granted it will be colder and I will have talent + some extras...would it be wiser to use the normal inefficient power hungry heat disbursing lights? (i.e. slightly cheap way to provide heating to keep people from being disgruntled)...but maybe I should just spring for a few space heaters from wal-mart and just return em when I'm done - but then there is the liability with the heaters, though I can't think of anything except for excessive hair spray that might be flammable.

3) In the end all of this could be somewhat negated in post as I might vie for B&W - but I'd rather capture as good a color image as possible first, and save that for later. These are just some photos I found since I don't have time to hit the location just yet today - but the last two definitely show the warmness you'd percieve with the naked eye. I'm just brainstorming and wondered if anyone knew what I could do to obtain what I want out of this...

Um yea...I'm not sure who this guy is - but I guess he serves as a decent measure of how the light interacts with skin tones.

even here you can see how warm the light is inside the tunnel in comparison to regular daylight

 

[Fake Name]

The light's not just warm, it's that sodium discharge stuff. Yuk. So, if you can't beat 'em... I say shoot available lignt, with a little off-camera warmed gelled fil- or none at all if using hot light. Use the daylight balance on the camera. Let it look like your scouting shot.

Or, bring iin two grip trucks and light it with all HMI's. Should run about $5k, with rentals. No problem...


fn

 

[J.R. Hudson]

Personally; I don't mind mixing color-temps but the real question Rafe is what are wanting it to ultimately look like? IN post you can more or less do anything with grading. Perhaps simply White Balancing off the lights alone will be enough

And as mentioned; if in the end it's Black and White it wont make any difference

 

[Ralph Oshiro]

Flourescents from Home Depot, with party gels look fine for colored lights and they're real cheap.

 

[Rafe]

Wow thanks guys! And lol, that is so funny I started throwing some Photoshop filters on these and starting thinking the same...

5,000 for HMIs? Hell to the no. For the most part the sodium lights aren't that yucky - sort falls into the contrasty range I want ...I just know that what my eye sees - and what a contrasty video camera sees might yield two different things. I'm just going to have to go the location early shoot some scrap footage and play with the lighting and see what its giving me. I'm thinking more and more, even if the colors aren't what I want (which they pretty much are) like you were saying John - I have tons of post options, and hell B&W actually looks sorta nice anyhow.

You know what the funny thing is, everytime I see John's avatar I just can't help but to imagine Christopher Walken' s icy cool calm collected new yawkish voiceover whatever he types.

 

[MattC]

just remember, if your going to go to B&W monitor the shoot in B&W for contrast ratios (to insure you're not just a wash of grey (you want something like John did)

To me, without knowing what you're going for, that last shot begs for "pools of light" I would use the supports, not only for creating shadows but to hide small lights. There is another thread about light meters and here is a perfect example of where I would use one, to set up ratios throughout the scene. I think if you take your time and experiment, you could come up with some pretty dramatic looks here. I'd LOVE to light that location. Since there seems to be a lot of natural light coming from above (no?) cutting light will be just as important as placing it.