How to Create Night Bar Scenes

Today was our first day of filming for our client's project and while it took a lot more time than I initially expected it to, I was happy and satisfied with the outcome so far.

As I have already alluded to in my blog post on lighting, this scene we shot today required a lot of creative innovation on my part, since it was my job as a cinematographer to mock up a nightly bar scene during the day.

I must say that I am really pleased with the lighting I set for that scene. I wanted to recreate a pub scene like I know and remember them from my home in Frankfurt: Strongly lit, with different colours, either red and green (as in our scene here) or blue and orange. While I thought the combination of blue and orange to be too stark regarding the positive feeling of the character I wanted to convey, I opted for the red and green option.

Another difficulty with the scene was the use of sliders in accordance with the actors and their act. It took us many attempts for it was a difficult task to keep the movements on the slider smooth while signalling the actors to laugh AND capture all that in the right angle and with the right turn. For I did not only track, I also attempted to simultaneously pan and turn to give the audience the feeling of being directly involved and engaged in the discussion.

So when I set the lighting, I used two Dedo Felloni 2 and mounted them on stands. I both set them to 5.600 K and gelled one light with a red LEE filter and the other one with a green gel. I then set the intensity of the redly gelled light to 100% while I set the green one to 24%. I ended up using two layers of scrims on the green light because it kept throwing a very distinctive square of green light onto the background of the shot that I sought to eliminate by further bouncing the green light of off the wall to the left, creating a subtle green hue around the edges of the sofa.

We then added reaction shots and cutaways to the existing footage as well as altered the entrance scene since our crew members and our actress were unable to wait for night to fall so that we could film an outside scene in authentic light.

However, looking back at what we accomplished today, I am really proud that my first attempt of mocking up an indoor night scene turned out to be so visually convincing to me. And while this is far from being the subtle lighting I so admire in series like House of Cards (2013- ) or films like The Grand Budapest Hotel (XXXX), I am nonetheless happy that I could accomplish this much on my first attempt.

Now it's a waiting game until Tuesday and Wednesday where the next challenge lies ahead: Filming about 25 movement shots (ambitious at least for now) and at least one close up with a shallow depth of field and manual focus pull (yep, ambitious), in less than nine hours. With rigging and de-rigging.

Yay!

References:

House of Cards (2013- ) USA: Netflix [online]

Anderson, W. (2014) The Grand Budapest Hotel [DVD] USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures

MerkenMerkenMerken