Looking for some lighting advice for an all-nighttime film

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WarVibe24

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My friends and I are about to shoot a film that takes place entirely at night. The final scene is a big fight that takes place on top of a parking garage, and in the script, a vehicle's headlights are left on aiming at the two men. I'm worried about this because of the shadow issue. The cameraman wouldn't be able to film with his back to the lights because his shadow would appear in the shot. So does anyone have any advice on what would be the best way to go about doing this? The parking garage has some lights itself, but they're quite dim.

My other question is about an abandoned hospital we're filming at. This is an indoor fight scene, and it'll be at night time. There's no electricity there, so what do you guys recommend would be the best way to go about doing this? A generator, battery powered lights, etc.
 
Best way, or do you have budgetary restraints you need to adhear to?
Easiest way... Rewrite your script to daytime locations, or should I say write what is within your means to shoot. Best way to pull off night location shots for a film in which you do not have the experience to do so, hire a lighting and grip truck with gaffer. I know that's not what you want to hear, but you did ask.

Good luck!
 
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The cameraman doesn't have to be directly in line with the lights, surely? Why can't the lights be to his side, but pointing to the action he's filming??

Re the hospital scene, are you trying to represent a hospital without power or with power? That will point you to your best solution - either somehow adding lots of lighting to look as if the rooms are lit normally, or adding exterior lighting (e.g. fake moonlight or street lights) to shine in through the windows.
 
David W. Jones said:
Best way, or do you have budgetary restraints you need to adhear to?
Easiest way... Rewrite your script to daytime locations, or should I say write what is within your means to shoot. Best way to pull off night location shots for a film in which you do not have the experience to do so, hire a lighting and grip truck with gaffer. I know that's not what you want to hear, but you did ask.

Good luck!
Click to expand...

Best way to get experience is by doing. If you don't have the experience, go out, do it, and screw it up. Rinse and repeat until YOU are the gaffer with the grip truck. The thing you have to ask yourself is what level you're at and how much money and time you want to spend versus how much you want to learn. I've always done everything myself (no, I don't want to, it's out of necessity). I'll be honest, I've made some pretty crappy short films, but not one of them do I regret because I learned something on each one, stuff I never could have figured out by not doing myself. A couple times I had a bit of cash (in my bank account, not as a film budget) and I maybe could have hired some crew/equipment, but would it really have been worth it, considering I was so under-experienced as a director? Pros and cons. Don't start hiring until you're at that level.

In regards to lighting, you could look into renting battery powered lights, but that can be pricey and not work so well at this level. If you're not worried about noise, get a genny and go from there, though again, price. Your best option is to probably to stick with the headlights. For added lighting, get a couple other cars and use their lights as well. The thing about low/no budget filmmaking is learning to jerry-rig the heck out of everything. If your headlights are too harsh, bounce 'em with whiteboards or something reflective and/or shine 'em through sheets or some kind of silk. Lighting this way will be fairly hard to control, but it will be better than no light and while it may not be effortless, you can still get some really nice looking stuff. Experiment! Try using some headlights bounced into diffusion, or at least just bounced so you can get better control of positioning.

Also, in regards to day for night. ONLY do it if you have practiced that kind of post conversion ahead of time (or able to light a day time scene for night on set). I guarantee you, if you're not willing to sit there and do hours of rotoscoping and postwork to turn a sunny day into a moonlit night, day for night will be more trouble than it's worth. And, it's always going to look different than actual night time. Only time I've ever been able to really do this well is when I can completely control the lighting on my set, outside it's a bust. Same for when I've lit night for day. Again, pros and cons.

Hope this sparks some ideas :)
 
In the parking garage, if you need to boost the existing lights, you can get bulbs to match most public lighting sources and trick out you own fixtures. I second dang, does the car headlight shot have to be shot with the frontal light? Also, you can shoot with car headlights, but they don't have to be attached to a car. Go to an off road vehicle supply house and get a set of high output off road lights and set up some fixtures to be your car headlights. Wire them up through a 12 volt DC power source, put them on stands, or other mounts, throw in any appropriate grip-ology, and you can position them how you want them.

I have shot a low budget horror film in an abandoned hospital, but we had power to parts of the building and we were able to run juice into the parts without it. You are going to need electricity. Double check the location and see if there is any electric service available. If there is, you can hire a qualified electrician to tie into to that (In accordance to all local laws and standards) and distribute power as is needed. If that is not an option, then rent some generators. If you are shooting fictional narrative, you are not going to be able to do it with battery powered lights... just the thought of trying to do that gives me, "...The all over quivers...". (Obscure movie line reference... Sorry). So, go with generators. Honda makes a series of generators that are "Reasonably" quite that are readily available for rent.

Lighting for "Dark" is tough. You really don't have to be a stickler for "Pure" motivated light. Established cinematography conventions give a great amount of leeway in lighting nighttime scenes. You watch movies for even a little while and you see that sometimes the nighttime lighting seems to come from that same magic place that the music comes from. That being said, you still will want to set up some kind of motivation for the lighting of any major scene. If the scene takes place in an abandon hospital then the nighttime lighting could be established as the characters enter the location. One way to do that would be to establish streetlights, or “Moon” light coming in through the windows that light them. As they venture further into the location, you can still keep up a base light, as if coming from outside. You may want to also outfit your characters with powerful flashlights, or other portable lighting, and trick out some supplemental lighting to match that to give you pleasing portraiture lighting. Another technique that may be useful when trying to shoot “Dark” a variation of a lighting approach called “Lighting to a base”. “Lighting to a base” is lighting a scene to a base level of exposure with a diffuse soft light to bring the ambiance up to a level that is above the base of the toe (In film exposure) or above black clipping (In digital exposure). You then light above the base for your portraiture and space definition with additional lights. In your situation, giving your characters powerful flashlights and having them shine them into a bounce source (Bounce board, foam core or even white sheets set up off camera) as they move through the space may work.

Well, my $0.02 any way…
 
Regarding the top of the parking garage.... Why not shoot more or less into the lights, silhouetting the two guys. That would look nice. Apart from that simply shoot at an angle so that the camera man shadow falls outside the frame. Check out the Deakins interviews. In one of them he talks about the shot from No Country where Jones is standing in a doorway with the car headlights pointed towards the door he's standing in. I think that was a pretty sweet solution with two par lamps for head lights and then bounce cards to lift him up a bit.

Regarding the hospital... big sources from the outside, stepped down enough to make it look natural. Then bounce up when ever needed and rim light the actors when ever the source of the light (windows?) is in the frame. Motivation is tolerable towards small adjustments in my oppinion :) ie. if you have a window directly behind the actor, then you can get away with having a light rimming the actor from either left or right just outside the frame.
I think you can always get away with a small amount of ambient light even where there's not light source, since our eyes would adapt to a room where fx. the only source was an open door.

Gel accordingly or set the color temp on the cam if you dare :D
 
Move the camera so it's not making a shadow in the shot.


Edit: At the risk of lessening the impact of simplicity, let me elaborate and say that just moving the camera will solve your problem of a shadow (is your frame REALLY going to suffer if it's ten degrees over?), but on TOP of that, really solid cinematic lighting for a nighttime shot with high headlights is going to involve lots of backlight... having the most light come from directly behind the camera is going to give a very flat, amateur look.

The fact that it's a nighttime shoot using headlights is absolutely no different from any other scene, in that if you put the light directly behind the cinematographer, you're going to get a shadow in the shot.
 
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My best advice is to make sure you have enough light. If you starve the sensor, you increase noise, and you loose chroma. It is in general far better to use enough light to make the sensor happy during capture, then color grade it to the "night time" look of your choosing in post. IOW, if you capture all the information you need, you can throw a lot away in post. If you don't capture all the information you need, there's no recovery in post.

So say after me: "Don't starve the sensor!" Again...
 
If I could throw in a little bit of more advice... Don't be afraid of mix light sources and using unconventional lighting sources. When I shot in an abandoned hospital, I took advantage of mix light and used color to add separation and depth across a continuum from warmer to cooler. What I did was white balance, pretty much, to the action area in the mid ground and light the foreground warmer and the background increasingly cooler. For example, shooting down long hospital corridors, shooting with tungsten lights, I would use normal tungsten lights to light the action area, add some CTO of varying degrees to the lighting of the foreground and then lit the corridor with increasing levels of CTB to the end. This color gradient really help to add depth to the scenes. Also, looking at lighting 150 feet of corridor, I made a trip to Home depot and bought a bunch of the simple clamp work lights and used them, shining out of doorways in an alternating pattern, to establish the corridor lighting. Those little lights became my go to light when I needed a little light splash on a back wall, a cross light on the talent or sometimes a scene key light in tight space. It sounds like your emphasis is on fictional narrative filmmaking on a low budget and are starting out with lighting. In this situation, I suggest that you drop some cash and put together a kit with some good quality pro lights. There are a lot of threads here to guide you on that. I also suggest that you put together a kit with lots of unconventional and specialty lights. Shooting fictional narrative, you are going to find yourself in a situations where you, just need a little glow on the front of that desk or need a splash of light on an object in the back ground, or want some light to shine up from below a bar, or want some light to mimic the light from a car dashboard, and on and on... . In those situations you can spend a lot of money and use pro specialty lighting gear, or you can be innovative and use less expensive unconventional lighting. Don't be afraid of using fixtures from big box retailers or off of eBay. Here are a couple of links to start with in that vein.

http://www.hurlbutvisuals.com/blog/2011/11/lighting-basics-going-with-what-is-available/

http://www.hurlbutvisuals.com/blog/2011/12/lighting-with-home-depot-lights-part-2/


You will also need some basic grip gear. Here is a video that shows some of the basics:


Good luck.
 
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