Lighting a Dim Restaurant for a Steadicam "one-er"

M

mikeshu

Well-known member
Hi All,

I'm creating a 3 minute one-er short film on a shoestring budget and would love some recommendations on how to light a dim restaurant. I have two scout videos of the locations, but I'll just start with the images attached.

One is a sushi bar and another is a steak house, owned by a very generous owner lettings us go crazy in there for a day. I don't want to get too crazy, though, and can use some nondestructive ideas to light the set for a one-er that will show a lot of a restaurant as the actors move around.

I was thinking of using photofloods to replace the bulbs that can be replaced (mostly in the sushi restaurant option) and then buying floor lamps from ikea to place photo floods in for the steakhouse (since the steakhouse has hard to access lighting options).

Another big concern is shadow. From crew. All I can think of is making sure crew is on opposite side of key lighting sources, but that would create more of a backlight for the actors.

I'm a relative newb at lighting sets, since our expertise is events, so any recommendations would be awesome! Thanks!
 

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Will you see the beamed ceiling in your shot? If not rent clamps and hang lights there. Rent small HMI's and Kino's if you don't have them.
 
We will try to find a decent focal length to both capture some close quarters action without revealing too much of the set. The thing is that we won't have time for complex setups since we're shooting around the restaurant's lunch and dinner schedules. Meaning morning for setup and rehearsal, break for lunch without obtrusive changes for business as usual in the restaurant and them immediately going in for the takes.

So use of source lighting is ideal. Super low budget too. I know I'm not giving much to work with, but if anybody has DIY kind of options that would be awesome :-)
 
Oh I wish :-(

Will be one long steadicam shot too. If I shoot wide open at like 1.2, the assistant will kill me. I might do it just to see the look on his face :-)

Any other lighting suggestions? I might just try out the ikea thing.
 
mikeshu said:
Oh I wish :-(

Will be one long steadicam shot too. If I shoot wide open at like 1.2, the assistant will kill me. I might do it just to see the look on his face :-)

Any other lighting suggestions? I might just try out the ikea thing.
Click to expand...

Get an attractive couple, and have the guy eat chicken in a erotic fashion... even if the place doesn't have chicken on the menu... worked for Tony Richardson in "Tom Jones"(1963)


Anyway, the DIY solutions often involve lights that have 'wild' color spectra, and so, will cause problems if there are things in the shot that have easily identified color shifts... like people's skin tone...

But for the long Sushi Bar, it seems to me that some amount of lights on the floor towards the bar would kick some light in there, to lift the darkness a bit. If the lights are flagged off so they don't have much light spilling upwards, it may help.

The DIY CFL lights again have CRI value problems along with frequently being in a muddy color temperature range... like 2700K. But you can get 5-6K, and because they have higher efficiencies have higher lumen output for their actual wattage. This may help in the overheads where one could not put a 500 W bulb in there because of the increased heat. (of course if it's rated for a hight wattage tungsten... well... that would work too...).

I've not tried to light big spaces with the garden variety Home Depot work lamps, but you could think about several 500 W halogens bouncing off a large sheet, behind the camera, especially when the shot includes the windows. (And probably select a better time of day if possible to avoid high noon blazing on the street...).
 
Thanks for the input! Yeah I was thinking of ways to bounce things around. As far as bulbs, I was thinking of sticking with the photoflood lights and turning the lights off whenever we can to avoid burning the place up. The color of the electrical lighting will at least be consistent. Though the color temp difference of daylight vs tungsten will be tough to balance in a single shot. We plan to shoot on the DSLRs, which won't give too much freedom in color correction, but we'll make do with what we've got :-)
 
I was not joking Mike.
If you budget and time frame is tight, renting a FS100 for the shot - instead of a wrangling a dozen lights - may be a butt saver.

I just shot a commercial in a huge pitch black wine vault.
This thing was the size of a hangar, with just one chandelier (about twenty 40w bulbs) way up on the ceiling and a few dozen candles.

I had the FS100 at 18db and a 35mm/1.4 Samyang at f4 - it came out super clean and great looking.

From your location pics, I would say, you can get away with just the practical light, that is already there and maybe a small kino and a bounce board for the close ups.

Frank
 
oooh, can you show me some footage? Thing is, pulling focus for a single steadicam shot will be a pain at 1.4 :-(
 
Don´t swaet it - on a fast glass (1.4) you can get away with f4.

Here is some grabs from that project.
It was much darker to the eye as in the footage.
Compared to this, your location is probably 5 times brighter.

Frank

Cinewein.Still001.jpgCinewein.Still002.jpgCinewein.Still003.jpgCinewein.Still004.jpgCinewein.Still005.jpg
 
You don't light for exposure, you light for effect. The very same reason why you use steady cam instead of simple stick - you do so for an effect, thus the advice to just go with available light might not be the greatest. What is your main stopper is the "shoestring budget". Even with some $$ puling off an effective stedaycam shots can be a challenge - the steady cam op has to be experienced to hit the marks, likewise the AC has to have to skills and experience to pull the focus on constantly hanging shot - none of those thinsg come free or even cheap. On top of that on "shoe string" you can't really afford enough extras to make the grandiose shot believable (hell sometimes it's a problem on a simple mediums shot on sticks!). Thus i would urge you to retching your approach (that is unless you simply want to play with steadycam and see its possibilities, then by any means go for it!). Stedaycam is a wonderful tool but they take time and $.
 
One thing that I don't think gets mentioned enough is the pupils of the actors' eyes.

I saw the movie "The Switch" recently. One particular scene jumped out at me. It was a nighttime shot, indoors (I think). I couldn't help noticing how the blue of Aniston's eyes just popped. Then I realized it was because her pupils were so tiny, undoubtedly due to the amount of light being poured on the scene. Which created a totally unreal look. If your character is in a low-light setting, then their pupils should be the appropriate size for such an environment.

Question for the lighting gurus -- How do you achieve good lighting on an indoor, "low light" scene without turning the talents' pupils into tiny dots?
 
+1 on Patryk's thought

However, it seems like you are doing this project for experiences. In the digital era, alot of production are abusing the lighting budget. And at the end of the day, it leaves to the DP to decide what to do with it. For me, I won't take those jobs.
Anyway,shooting on DSLR, I will go for ISO 800. Should give you enough to play around.
Don't worry about lighting the whole restaurant, only focus the part where they will sit down or stop. Use chinaball and b-board. Buy daylight balance household bulbs (photoflood is alot more expensive), switch the house bulbs. So now you will have more balance interior. On top of the sushi bar, it seems like MR16, if time permit, put 1/4 CTB on, to balance out a bit. If not permit, well you got to let it go.
Do some test shoot, bring the camera in and see what level of light you have. If the ambience light still too low for your taste, get some chinaball and hang them from the ceiling, it is a sushi store, they will match perfectly. Hopefully, this will answer your questions.

Now the BS part, since it is a shoestring budget, you can only do so much about lighting your scene.Yes, of course, they are looking for no budget, no time to rig but perfect lighting footage. It doesn't exist. So in this case, if you want to improve your footage quality, you should ask for more time. You should pre-rig the day before so you can just focus on rehearsal the next day. You got to fight for the good footage, if you don't fight for it no one will. Good luck.
 
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