Studio shoot lighting

After we decided we would use festoon lights (controlling individual lightbulbs would be too hard), I had a look to see how available they are. There seems to be a lot of choice and they´re not that expensive. I really like the lightbulb style ones and I think we all decided that would be best. That way we get the original style we wanted, but with the benefit of them all being attached together. I put a couple of links to amazon so you can get an idea of what were are looking at.

festoon lights 1

festoon lights 2

We have to make sure they are very dim, so we don´t have problems with shadows or flares. We also still want the lighting of the film to be lowkey.

The production team would have to make sure we don´t go over budget but I don´t think we will. Other than the lights and food for the actors, there´s not much else we would use our money for.

On top of the festoon lights we would want a table light, which I think we could just borrow from someone. It should be dimmed as well as not to cause flares. I imagined it being a little old fashioned light like in the image below:

Outside of the set we would have a dim blueish light as "moonlight". We use the name "void" to describe the outside. We want it to be strange and empty and fee a little scary. For this reason we want it to be quite dark and not have a clear direction or source from the "moonlight". We would use one of the big studio lights, dimmed and with a blue gel.

Anne wanted to give us a workshop on lighting, even if it had to be online. So to give her a better idea of our setup Ieva sent her some photographs. I did some notes on them as well:

(It´s meant to say 17th Jan)

Link to the site Ieva used: nofilmschool.com/film-lighting-techniques-and-examples

The lighting workshop 19.2. 

Anne set up a sort of studio in her own living room. She completely blocked out her windows and then set up studio lights and an extra camera she had at hers. We were all so impressed by her dedication. Here or some notes I made:

We can´t have lights too bright! No flares/white spots on screen. Dim the light and add studio light to brighten area

We need to be careful of shadows

If we want to make shadows: the closer to the light the bigger but fuzzier. We need to figure out how to set up camera so that it´s not in the way. 

Here Anne was explaining how the table lamp would work. A normal light like hers is too bright, as you can see it is completely white and is causing some flares. We would need to dim it, but also it is not at all bright enough to light her face as you can see. We need to bring in a studio light and make it look like it is the table lamp that is bright enough, whilst also retaining the details of the lamp.

Here I think she had set up a studio lamp off screen. Here face is more lit up but it´s still quite dark.

Here she got very excited about shadows. She showed us how we could make it work and it looked very cool (although here she is a bit off screen). I think actually this workshop got us all excited about this project again. I´m really hoping we will be able to film it at some point. 

I would love to have shadows in our film so I thought about how we could do it. I realised it would be hard to do when we see the character though the window, which when we first see his full body. (Or anyone more than before). Seeing as he is next to the armchair in front of the window, he would have to be kind of in front of the lamp. We could make his shape unclear with light coming around him, but his shadows would be harder. In the last drawing I show how we could have maybe a bit of one. It´s not the kind of shadow I wanted though, I will see where we could do it better.

I would love to have some Nosferatu type shadows. It was so famous for it and I think it could also work very well for our film. It keeps the character a mystery, and it´s sort of eerie. I love love love it.

I might add this into account when I do the storyboard. If I find a good moment I could suggest to add a frame with just a shadow.

I made a sort of plan for where the lights would be placed. Unfortunately I don´t know the measurements of the set so it might be completely inaccurate, but I think it´s still helpful to see what I was imagining. I´m hoping this sort of clarifies everything.

 

I´m not sure if were going to use the second window. We talked about blocking it off, but I think it could look really nice to have strays of lights coming through.