lightng a dance club scene for nusic video...

Sithxace

Sithxace

Well-known member
so im shooting a hiphop music video that takes place for a lot of the time in a dance floor a club for dancing etc. what is the best appoach to lighting it to where it looks dark like at a club but good? any advice?

also should i stick to my dvx100b with the better low light quzlity or take a chance with a hvx200 with hd but worse low light quality?
 
Just remember two things.

1. It doesn't have to be dark to be dark.

2. Fill! Your camera can't handle extreme amounts of contrast, so you need to fill things in so it can see properly. From there you can push the contrast more in post, but that'll give you a good image to start with.
 
im thinkig using soft lights hitting the walls to create nice fill in the background. sound like a good idea?
 
Well. It depends. Do you have access to any lighting inside the club?

Luckily, both of the cameras you're using have global shutters, so you won't run into any half bright frames if you use anything that strobes.

My first thought would be to see if they have a bunch of par cans in a grid. Gel them all different colors and put them on some sort of chase sequence that just makes them dim up and down and do whatever crazy things you can make them do. Hit the background and probably even the foreground with these.

Then what you can do is use a big soft source, maybe gelled half or 1/8th blue, just to give it some color, and use that as your base. That way if you have all the lights off in the club, you still have something going on...It'll also act as your fill when the par cans are going up and down.

Another thing you can do is get a fog machine, constantly keep this going and fogging up the room. You don't want it to look like fog, you just want it to haze the room so you get streaks of light. This will kill your contrast a bit, so if you can keep it away from your talent and more on the background, that's the best thing to do. Good luck controlling that though.


I think a good thing to do is watch the quintessential club video....Usher - Yeah.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiXbRBS5Z58

Honestly, from watching this video it's just as I sort of explained. You can see they have this base blue in there and then this lights that just come up and down sometimes fast sometimes slow, depending on the mood they're trying to create.

If you want to be really annoying, get a streak filter and bang a bunch of lights into the lens. Then just watch as the hip hop video happens before your eyes!

The one thing you should stay away from is red. It's not captured very well on both the DVX and the HVX. It's the one sure thing that'll make your video look like crap.
 
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ok so rule of thumb is dont shoot too dark cuz u can easily simulate darkness in post, use the lights and maybe some haze of thats possible
 
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