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Shooting stadium lights.
I am shooting a campaign promoting high school football. I want to open the piece with the stadium lights flashing on with sfx. Of course, we all know that those stadium lights take forever to warm up. How do I fake this effect in the camera and post?
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2 Replies
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Time lapse it, speed up the footage, add fake light and luma-key it in during post, add lights using a compositor. Many options.
“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”
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I think what I’d do is, if this is just a couple seconds as part of a montage or something, just create a silhouette of the lights on their poles, shot from directly below, in photoshop, just by drawing them, or by taking a digital still photo and creating a masked alpha version. Throw a still of an evening sky behind the silhouette, add a flashbulb light effect to the top layer in the same place where the bulbs of the real lights would be, and just play that flashbulb pop effect in slo-mo, finishing with throwing the contrast to the extreme, in a fade to white, as if a video camera’s auto-iris were being blown out.
You could do this without any advanced compositing at all, just 3 layers of luma keys and the stills, with a slomo maybe. If you throw a slow slight overall pan or dolly move on the entire composition, it will sell the real-ness of it a little bit more.
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