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Lighting a Hallway for a Documentary-Look video.
I’m shooting a series of Narratives which include two hallway scenes. The videos will be shot in 2 Hallways, a school hall and a hospital hallway. I do not have specifics on the hallways (dimensions, turns) but I do know both use overhead florescent lights. I am planning on placing 500 watt, high angled, Omni lights diffused and set to flood in each classroom/examining room and either leaving the doors open or shining them through the door’s windows. I am a film student, this is one of my first paying gigs so I want this to go well. The entire video is from the main characters point of view. Have you ever lit a long hallway for a normal, natural look?
Please let me know how you did it or if you have any ideas.
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3 Replies
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It sounds to me like you have pretty well figured this out. Yes, I’ve shot lots of hallways with light coming from open doors combined with overhead fluorescents. The first thing I’d recommend is to go and visit both locations to see what is actually there. Don’t rely on reports from people on the site. You need to place your eyeballs on location.
You will also need to deal with color: are the overheads cool or warm fluorescents? All commercial/residential fluorescents emit a green spike. You may want to add some plus green to your lights, and if the overheads are cool (daylights) then roughly 1/2 blue to your tungsten lights, so that your lights roughly match the color of the hall lights both on the red-blue axis and the magenta-green. Then white balance in that light, if you are shooting video.
You can diffuse your open-door lights or make them hard. Look at the hard version and see if you like it.
Finally, for the areas of the hall between the open doors, you may or may not want some frontal (light) fill.
Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com -
[Tommy Agostino] “Have you ever lit a long hallway for a normal, natural look?”
Yep… I wrote a long behind-the-scenes post about it a while back, because I had solicited a lot of advice about a special on-the-dolly China-ball rig that we used. The post though also detailed the lighting setup though, so maybe it will be of some use…
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/47/858156
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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This was very helpful, thank you!
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