• Wondering which camera, gear, computer, or software to buy? Ask in our Gear Guide.

Lighting at Night

Hello. I'm a filmmaker coming from an animation direction background. I'm moving into directing live action now, for better or worse!

The biggest obstacle I'm finding is switching my knowledge of lighting to a real world setting. In animation, I can light quite well (I believe) and get the exact look I'm looking for. But I get on a set, and there's all these cords.... and ...light things.... and...

Ok, it's not that bad, but I could use some help. The next scene that is going to be shot is a newscast. In the film, the main characters will be watching a newscast on TV, a newscast I need to create. It needs to take place at night and 'out in the field.' I went out to do some testing at the location this week and as I was expecting, we ran into a lot of issues. I want to light the newscaster fairly brightly from 'the camera light', but the background will have a lot happening in it, so you'll need to be able to see it fairly well. The bottom image is the location, but with the gain turned up way high on the camera. I'd love the background to be lit this well, but not look quite so horrible! The top picture is with a subject in the forground. He's overblown and yellow, and the background is black.

So I'm looking for as detailed help as I can get, what would need to happen to get a nice looking shot. I realize the answer to all of this most likely is 'more light', but I don't know specifically what we'd need to get a great shoot. I dont need/want the city to be amazingly lit (since this should look somewhat like it's news footage), but light enough that everything is easily visible. Much like what some of the Cloverfield footage (Statue of Liberty Scene) looked like. But with a reporter.

Thanks for any help I can get!

LightingExample.jpg
 
Last edited:
Turn off the automatic exposure. Reduce the amount of light
on the subject. Then adjust the exposure until you get close
to what you want.
 
yeah, the goal is to balance the amount of light on the subject and the amount on the background. If the BG is too dark... since you can't change the background, you'll expose to the background, then add your talent to the foreground and bring up the light until it exposes correctly for where the camera is set based on the background. Grainy would be normal in a nighttime news footage shoot as news camera folks can't necessarily add that much light to an expansive background either.
 
Back
Top