Shooting at Night

gbmatty

gbmatty

Member
hey there

working on my 2nd film right now and we have a huge problem about shooting a night scene...

what is the best way to do it without getting a grainy picture?
i want to get a great feeling of night without having too much light in the scene.

we thought about shooting at daytime and it's also a problem to darken the sequence (you can still see it's daytime or it's too dark). using a pair of Canon GL1's and have midnight blue gels for the lights (simulate the moon)
The lights I have are some Halogen 1K and a pair of small spotlights that are like 100watts.

will this do the trick? I know that there's a whole lot to it but I think I'm going in the right direction. is there a sticky or a tutorial about lighting at night that I can read today? we start principal shooting on Friday.

thank a bunch!

matty
 
If you have all your lights already, go shoot test footage tonight. That way, if they don't work, you have time to fix things before Friday rolls around.
 
If you've got a few bucks to throw to a rental house I'd recommend that you get one or two Arri 575w HMI's. They are cheap to rent (usually $75-100 bucks per day) and the will really help you getting your exposure when shooting at night.

You can run them off household power, or a Honda EU2000i genny as well.
 
I did indeed do a preshoot and found that I had over lit the scene. So, I'm going to cut back a little on the lighting to make it more like night instead of day. Thanks for the heads up though.
 
I've considering renting but prefer to buy equipment since I know that there's issues w/ the used stuff. Thanks again for the advice, much appreciated!
 
There shouldn't be any huge issues with stuff from the rental house...they make a business out of renting and maintaining equipment. Plus, lights are tough. And expensive.
 
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