Lighting a club - making it "look" dark

M

mrWr0ng

Well-known member
I've got a gig coming up in a couple of weeks where the producer has rented out a club for a night time shoot. It's a music video, but they want it to be like a more typical club scene, though the club will be basically empty.

What is the best way to go about lighting this so that I can get plenty of detail, but make it still "look" like it's night time? I was thinking about picking up some gels, gelling the hell out of the lights and going with a lot of light and stopping down, then darkening it in post to give it that "this is a club" vibe. I figured with video (I'll be shooting on an HVX) it would be better to err on the side of more light to have the most amount of detail then darken it up in post, but I'd love alternate opinions - would it be better to underlight, with just a few spots on whatever I'm shooting to bring it out of the darkness?
 
I just shot a scene like this in a bar. The trick is to control the light and light only what you need to (the talent mostly). Smaller, focusable lights are great for this. We also used multiple colors --- light from one side with orange/yellow, and from the other with blue. Also, make sure you give your talent some backlight/toplight to separate them from the background (blue looks great if your actors have dark hair --- any color will work well for lighter hair). Then, give the background little spashes of light here and there to give a little bit of detail (so it doesn't look like a cave). Also, if you're shooting on the DVX or HVX, drop that Master Ped setting down to -8 or so and crush your blacks. The HVX/DVX looks better in these low light set-ups when things are very high contrast.
 
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