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What lights will I need to light a park at night?
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What about a scene like this shot at night?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_5lMvwfs0U
It’s actually quite dark, and not lit very much accept for around the actor. Could I make something like that work, but with five actors around?
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Yes, you could do this–you’ll just need to block the scene carefully. Lens choice depends on camera and sensor–for APS-C/Super-35 I’d be looking at 28mm on the wider shots, and 35mm for medium shots. No longer than 85mm for the whole scene, I’d say. Wide lenses could make it so your victim is (a) isolated in the frame in a sea of black, which is effective, and (b) allow you to get closer to your victim while still showing enough background to bring the killers into the background-to-midground in clearer focus. As for getting to a park, you have plenty of opportunity to show this–porch lights would easily motivate some spillage light as we see her run into the bushes. Or have her pause under a streetlight on the other side of the street, look back, and see the killers come running around her house. Then she ducks into the bushes, and boom, we’re in the park.
Good location scouting and storyboarding will help you to plan this stuff.
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Okay thanks.
It was said before that f11 is way too closed to be shooting at night, but could I get away with f5.6 as long as I get enough lights in there, or is that still too crazy too shot at?
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Actually maybe wide lenses for some action shots are the way to go cause according this:
https://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html
On a 35 at f2.8 at night, I can get 10 feet of space that is in focus perhaps. If f2.8 is enough. In this example I posted before, we shot on the Sony A7s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o1G_-zRltQ
Now as you can see there is a lot of noise at night. I read that the A7s is able to see very well at night. However, what aperture do you need to shoot at if shooting under street lights for example, for it still be able to see very well without noise?
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On your budget of zero dollars, shoot day for night, but shoot at dusk or early morning, so you have at least some level of overall light. Then play with it in post; this is much easier to do now than even 2 years ago.
You could add a fake streetlight anywhere you need one: just put a lamp on a pole and frame so the pole isn’t seen… or make a prop pole that’s just high enough to fill your frame.
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Okay thanks, but the problem with shooting that early in the morning is that the light changes after an hour. Most scene shoots can take up to six or more hours, especially if it’s a big scene with lots going on as is this, so I am going to need more than an hour in the morning to shoot it though.
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Are you re-doing “Apocalypse Now“?!??
I can’t imagine why or how it could take you that long to shoot some guys running thru a park scene. Even with multi-angle coverage. Do they stop in the middle for an hour of dialogue? Maybe you could describe the scene in more detail, and I’d get it?
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Well basically these killers are chasing a woman through the park, cause the character knows too much and they want to silent her. She calls the police, and the main character, a cop, gets the call, and realizes that it’s his case and he goes to the park to look for her to an intervene before it’s too late. So it’s a lot more than just running, but a chase, and hide and seek game, told from different character’s perspectives, which leads to a fight, a gun stand off, and some shootings. So it would take quite a while to shoot in my experience, with shooting action scenes before.
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Not six-plus hours. For an outdoor shoot that’s basically un-lit except for the sun and maybe one practical….Unless it was a big-budget Hollywood movie.
You don’t need huge wide shots for this, except maybe for a single establishing shot that it’s a park. Your chase and shoot-out actions are all things that can be shot in a smaller space within that park or forest or whatever. In fact you could use that to your advantage, if it’s for example a very dense forest and the trees block everything in the distance by creating little slits in the visual field, like peep-holes, or slats in a privacy fence, thru which the pursuing figures move, and the pursued figure hides. Like a Bev Doolittle painting of horses among birch trees or the like. Most of the bullet hits in the gun battle will be glancing off the trees, until the combatants can close to rock-throwing ranges. This also gives the lighting plot a look of dappled light and shadow, which you can post-process as day-for-night if needed, but it need not *be* night to make this a cool sequence. You’d need to find the right kind of dense wooded terrain, and create the motivation/excuse for the characters to end up in it. It would work the same if it was a lumber yard, or a warehouse full of shelf units and pallets, a train yard with many parallel tracks and sets of boxcars, a Library stacks area, a large cube-farm of identical paneled workstations, like Neo’s day job in The Matrix… a packed public car garage, etc. And the garage or library seems like it makes more sense as a place for the chase to happen than some park… but I haven’t read your script. Chases are often boring, because they’re not clever, don’t really have believable stakes, or they don’t actually move the plot along. Often, they are set-pieces the director and camera op are staging to show off their skills, but that’s ego, not story-telling.
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Okay thanks, but in my experience, chase sequences take longer to shoot cause they require more shots. They don’t all have to be wide shots, but they require a lot more shots, compared to simple dialogue scenes, and therefore it would take probably a few hours I am guessing, more than it takes for the sun to rise at dawn for sure.
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