Nighttime Lighting - Light Towers?

G

Gukbe2000

Member
Hello,

I'm planning on shooting a film that takes place at night in a cemetery. I'm trying to come up with a way to light a large area of the cemetery so it appears as moonlight. Helium light balloons are incredibly expensive so I was wondering about renting a construction light tower. I've already checked into pricing and it's not really an issue. Here's an example (http://www.bluerents.net/products.asp?categoryID=87). And here are some specs on the light towers:

Max. Tower Height ft. 32 ft
Floodlights 4 1000 watt Metal Halide Lumens 440,000
Light Coverage, acres 5 to 7

Has anyone here had any experiencing using one of these for lighting night scenes or heard from anyone who has?

Thanks!
 
I recently went to a construction rental outfit to check into exactly what you're describing. The rental prices are certainly WAY cheaper than a comparable amount of HMIs but I'm not holding my breath on the quality of light.

Anyhoo, the rental dude sparked up the gennie that powers the the light heads and it's really quite loud - considerably more than one of the Honda/Home Depot rental units. Color temp was also questionable but tough to determine during the daylight.

Regardless, I'm going to try and find some local highway crews doing night time maintenance. I'll try and steal some shots under the lighting conditions at night and see what happens...


Hopefully I can post something this weekend.



dmc
 
I bet they flicker pretty badly and have a lot of color shifting, but if it is all you can get it might work.
 
When you do a moonlight scene, you have to CC anyway, so I would not care too much about color temperature.

But if I where you I would shoot dusk/dawn for night - it makes all the lighting fuzz much easyer.

Frank
 
Thanks for all your feedback and suggestions. Perhaps if dmc finds a construction light in use and snaps a few pics it'll be a little more to go on.
 
Hey guys,

I was out of town this past weekend so I didn't get a chance to scout for night time construction sights.

I'm still hoping to find something later this week - I haven't forgot.



dmc
 
Yeah, I would look into the scissor lift and an HMI. Looking at the spec sheets, I'm sure of two things. DMC has already sort of stated them both.

1) The quality of light coming out of that light tower is going to be crappy.

2) it says from 10 ft away, the sound of the generator or engine is 72 decibels. Which is about equal to busy street traffic. At least with the HMI, you can get a decent sized genny and run cables quite far away and behind things. With this, the generator is tethered to the light. I'm sure your sound guy wouldn't be too pleased to see you sparking that thing up.

Do you think you could find money in the budget to get that? I know we found a construction rental place that was hurting for rentals and gave us a scissor lift for a pretty decent price. Since you're shooting over a bit longer of a time, I'm sure you could strike a deal with not only the rental house for the light, but also for the lift as well.
 
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