Lightning????

A

Aaron David Lavinsky

Active member
I need to create the effect of lightening for a short I will be shooting this weekend. Any advice on how to create the effect of lightening?

heres what Ive got

3 x 300/600 watt switch halogens w umbrellas and softboxes, 1 250 watt focus control light. 5x 500 watt flood lights and 3x 250 watt mini floods.

I also have a nikon SB600 flash which could maybe work.

any advice would be amazing.
 
I'm in the same boat....I have a somewhat gothic music video shoot coming up where I need to simulate a lightning storm....without it looking cheesy!

I really don't want to flash any of my tungten lights and ruin any bulbs. What I'm thinking of doing...and haven't tried yet is picking up or borrowing 2 strobe lights (the flashing kind you see at a rock concert) to set outside of a couple windows....I also think to make it look more real I would need to bounce light inside to sell the lightning for being a real flash and to create more even light in the room.

I was thinking of setting the 2 outside strobes to hit the outer edges of the window and maybe bounce to an object like a tree in the background to capture the flash.

I only think any of this will work if they are all connected to a master switch that you would need to get a feel for the flashes to make them look good. Also, maybe without hitting the lights have some water trickling down the outside windows through a hose with holes or PVC pipe.

I haven't tried any of this...I'm still planning the shoot which is about 5 weeks away. ....if you try any of this before I do, let me know how it works! :)
 
My favorite is to use "shutters" with an HMI It gives the best control. I like to have one HMI upclose with a wide lens, and one on a background object, like a tree, it really helps to sell the look.

If you don't have access to a rental house, then Goto a thriftstore and buy a bunch of older cameras w/ flashes. They sell them here for like $1ea. have a couple of people try to set them off at the same time. I've seen some very convincing lightning from this techinque.

-j
 
buy a powerful cheap little worklight or two with a switch, and flash it all you want. plug them all into the same power strip and then flip the power strip switch to flash them all at once.. (dont burn the place down with pulling too much through that cheap power strip though) color is around 3000k for most of them and if you let it warm up in advance it should look ok. if you want it to give a bluish light ompared to the rest of your lighting , youll have to do some colorization somewhere in your flow though .. personally id just have it flash white with the cam balanced to 3200k
 
Shaw said:
Soldering? Welding perhaps? Soldering doesn't make any light =D.
Click to expand...

I was on a shoot that used an arc welder to make a very cool lightning effect. Was very realistic and cheap. Make sure the person using the welder knows what they are doing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top