Night shot

[rajour]

Hey everybody I am new to DVXusers and just got my 100A this week. Anyway, I am shooting a short and I do have a question concerning lighting techniques. How do I use this camera and go about shooting a night scene in a bedroom. Do I use blue gels or is it color correction in the Avid to get the effect I want. The shot is an extreme close up of a persons face with a body in the background (selective focus), it will blurred but still can make out the body.
Anyone has any ideals...please forgive me if this question was asked before.

 

[J.R. Hudson]

Re: Night shot

Gels would work as will POST as will Incamera tweaking. The important thing to remember here is HOW you light the shot. I imagine this will be "Moonlight" coming into the room?

Splashing the light in hard shadows will be the way to go and NOT a bright soft light. Splash the light onto the subjects and perhaps across the room leaving darkness for the imagination.

 

[Scottdvx100]

Re: Night shot

Shoot your shot at normal exposure and color balance. You may want to flip on the ND's to keep the iris open to minimize depth of field.

In your editing system adjust the image darker, more blue and remove some saturation to get the 'night time' look you want. That's assuming you want ambient moonlight type of look. If you need to see the room lights on then you may have to selectively control their color and brightness in your editing system. You may also have to add more light coling from these practicals.

If you have access just shoot off a short piece ahead of time and experiment with it.

 

[Stas_Tagios]

Re: Night shot

Blue moonlight is an accepted and effective Hollywood convention for representing "night," but not a necessity to convey the proper night ambience; you can achieve a "night" effect without the blue, as long as the shot is lit properly.

Of course, there are many approaches to acheiving a convincing night look; typically, a high contrast, low-key lighting scheme, with patches of bright light (whether blue or white) at key and lots of areas in darkness (whether falling into complete blackness or registering only minimal detail) works well.

There's also the David Fincher/Conrad Hall Jr. "Panic Room" look, which mostly eschews bright moonlight streaming through windows to provide illumination and instead attempts a more realistic sense of night time darkness.

As for whether to attempt to light for night on set or achieve the effect in post... I'd recommend doing it in production by gelling your lights (if you're after the "blue moonlight" look), rather than doing it in post, since DV has limited latitude for post manipulation; the more extreme your image manipulation in post (multiple filters, drastic changes in color and contrast), the greater the chance your footage will begin to exhibit unacceptable artifacting and pixelation (especially in areas of darker gray, that haven't fallen off to complete blackness).

There's some leeway if your footage is well-lit and properly exposed, but it's usually better, when working in a highly-compressed medium like DV, to keep your post image manipulation to a minimum when possible, and instead achieve your lighting effects on set.

I'm in the midst of production on a short set mostly indoors at night, and have opted for a fairly traditional "moonlight through windows" look. Shot some footage sans blue gels, planning to cool the image in post, but am finding artifacting creeping in to some shots where the color-correction is too extreme, and so will be shooting the rest of the project with blue gels on the lights.