I am the night

So I know I've been saying I might do music research in order to score my own film buttttt, I think I can do that later on when I am actually editing since that is when I would begin to score the piece, and I also think that I could use my research and time on something else that I need to know more urgently...which is knowing how to light an outdoor nighttime scene.

So I took to YouTube to see what I could find in terms of tips for shooting at night and how to light. A pretty solid one I found was this video by Matt Aitia, where he does 2 scenes outdoors at night and just documents the process and production behind the camera, only uses a panel and tube light. I say only but that panel cost $800...

But its fine, I have other resources that give children highly expensive equipment for free. Yayy! 

Anyway, the setup he had was pretty basic, the director and gaffer just played with the existing light in the shot and attempted to make the light as motivated as possible. This is the most realistic setup for me cause outside in the night in downtown Fort Lauderdale....I can't have that much of a set up with me. No outlets or plugs, so it all has to be battery-powered. Unless I want to buy one of those insane portable chargers that has every plug to ever exist. Which I may look into. For the main shot outside in the beginning (at least what I have right now in my head) would be in a parking lot under a street post, with the characters outside their car. I'll outline these scenes more in an upcoming post about a storyboard. 

So I also have to play with locations and location scouting, going out there with a camera and lights, and seeing what it looks like and what works best before I start filming. This also goes with the car scenes that I will have because a lot of that light will (hopefully) come from outside, so I just need to go myself and play around with how I can light a car interior at night. A video I watched for lighting a car was one uploaded by Brady Bessette, and while it wasnt too much help since he was very reliant on the equipment and lighting rig that he has, the example shots did give me some reference as to what I will probably have to work with. 

Here you can see that Brady used the motivated lighting of street lights and the dash in order to light the scene, which is definitely what I will have to play with. I can use things like the dash, streetlights, the radio/screen in the middle, overhead light etc. to try and light the scene as best I can. 

This will probably be the hardest part about filming. I think I have the resources to pull it off, its just planning and making sure it looks natural and real. But I think I'll go into this more on a later planning post when I start location scouting.