Lighting for night exterior scenes.

[Mark Jury]

Could I have some affordable tips for lighting night scenes -- for video. I want it to look like a moonlit night. I need to be able to see my actors. I don't want it to look Blair Witch style. More like X-Files on a very low budget.

[stop_thief]

I've just experimented with as many lights as I could manage....but there is one trick that has helped out quite a bit.

I believe it's been mentioned on this forum before...
it involves setting the white balance on your camera manually. Instead of using a white object, use a colored piece of construction paper. By using orange, your footage will have a bluish tint, etc.

It's like a filter in a can, man.
A filter for every single one of your light sources.

I used this technique very recently
for some exterior night scenes...mine though were supposed to be very blue, not completely realistic, but I'm sure a proper effect could be had with some "fiddling".

I'm afraid though my comments don't help much in terms of the actual lighting.

[mattias]

watch an episode of the x-files. freeze the frame and make a list: "blue hard light at eleven o'clock. yellow soft low light at half past five," and so on (camera is at six). put your lights the same way and walk them 'til the contrast looks right. since it's video, you have to think much about f-stops, which can otherwise be hard with night (low key) scenes. just bring a monitor, or a camera with a good viewfinder, and set the aperture to a value that looks good. then shoot it.

you now have a working setup that you can modify slightly and use whenever you need this look. you can create a low budget version of virtually any lighting style with four lights, some diffusion paper and a couple of yellow and blue gel, by following the above approach.

my first year of doing cinematography, i always kept a list like this of around ten styles that i liked and felt was "me". after a while, they had become "me". the setups changed slightly to match my style, and my style changed slightly to match the setups. :-) and i'm still making lists. sometimes even in the theater if i'm getting carried away by the lighting.

/mattias