moonlighting.

F

fanaticalproductions

Member
Hi.

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than I am can help me on this one.

I need to set up a shot where a child is sat on a bed and is illuminated by 'moonlight'.

We have a set of 3x 300 watts satchlers seen here http://www.videogear.co.uk/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=142

and a set of 3x ianpro redheads.

http://www.videogear.co.uk/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=319

Im guessing to get the moonlight tone the lights will have to have gels on them; but any specific type?

Also any tips on general set up of the lights would be very helpful.

Thanks.
 
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For moonlight I generally use 1/2 CTB gels and WB to tungsten.
Even if you just have a night light for motivation, having a tungsten source will help make it seem moonlighty instead of just blue, especially a 3050k source instead of 3200.

I try to keep moonlight as backlight or fill. IMO, it looks really weird as a key light usually.
 
I usually use Steel Blue, which i prefere over the usuak candy blue nights.
It looks more like mixture of green and blue.
There are some nice scenes in "El Laberinto del fauno", where they used that gel.
 
Thanks for the advice. I will check out that film. So would you say it is definetaly better to gel the lights than just colour grading in post?

Kit - i would love to use the moon if 1 it was bright enough and 2 controllable.

Kyle.
 
You need to use gels if you want the effect of two different colors. It's very difficult to grade two different color lights from lights that were the same color.
 
I feel that if you are replicating the moon as your dominate light source it would only make logical sense to replicate it as your key/kicker (moonlight kickers always look nice). With this said 1/2 ctb on anything from 500w-1k would work well as a key with a possible lower wattage bounce for a fill, also 1/2 ctb. Good luck with it and let us know how it turns out.
 
If yo uare working solely with tungsten, i would suggest keeping the light that you want to appear blue, completely naked of any gels ( except diffusion ) because as soon as you slap on a CTB or half CTB you are cutting tons of light. So a neat way to go about it is use your kicker / strong moonlight source, keep it tungsten, and then for your fill, eye light, etc,.. use a tungsten source with a CTO gel. Then shift everything 2400 degrees K in post. Works wonderfully.
 
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