I'm doing a film for my film class in college, and it's a horror flick. I'm having a lot of trouble getting good lighting. Since it's a horror movie, it obviously gets shot at night and needs a lot of shadow and stuff. I have a chead Sony Digital 8 camera. It doesn't have white ballance or anything. Any ideas to help me shoot these scenes?
What do you mean by your having trouble finding lighting? Do you not have access to the equpiment?
I saw this horror film a while back that used no electrical lighting equipment whatsoever, just fires and candle light. Very eerie and effective. If thats your problem, give it a go.
You have two options really:
1) Get a better camera somehow, unfortunatly with DV when shooting in low light conditions you need a camera with a really low lux rating or you end up with a nasty picture, as DV cameras love all the light you can throw at them.
2) Get some Halogen hardware lights from a store, they are cheap and although not the perfect colour temperature, they are the next best thing down from tungsten lighting. Light your shots as best you can. Then play around with the image in post.
Further to this, you could go 70s style and shoot the whole thing during the day and then just play around with the contrast, hue, stautration etc even further to make day into night.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Ahhh... the infamous day-for-night shot. Don't know who invented it, but you can see it all over the place in the OLD James Bond movies with Sean Connery.Originally posted by SolidusX2k:
...you could go 70s style and shoot the whole thing during the day and then just play around with the contrast, hue, stautration etc even further to make day into night.
As for using a halogen, those lights will definitely light up an area but they create really harsh shadows. You may want to soften the light by using a filter or diffusion paper. Another alternative is something we tried last summer. We hung up a white sheet between 2 trees and "bounced" the light off of that. It provided enough soft illumination for the camera to work with, although you'll want to add accent lights from behind the actors to create that "halo" you always see in movies to visually seperate the actors from the backgrounds. That's the tough part.
i'm not really a filmmaker.. but isn't there something called 'magic hour' or something like that! Basically between day and night there is about an hour transition were there is still some daylight lurking about. If you film at this time you get a nighttime feel but just enough daylight gets through. (I think its about the time the street lights come on? not sure tho :/ )
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