Another blue-gelled redhead was set in the hall outside the door, creating depth and colour contrast. The one that appears on camera was tented around so that we could shine in a blue-gelled redhead, to suggest moonlight, without allowing any daylight in.
#Flickery night light windows#
We had to shoot most of the scenes during the day, so the windows were blacked out. (See my post on cross-backlighting for more info.) This is almost always my starting point when lighting a scene with two characters, and it really came into its own on this project. What I mean by this is that each light was positioned so as to provide backlight on one character and frontlight on the other. This soon became a dedo rail, as I used magic arms and k-clamps to rig two of the little spotlights in a classic cross-lighting formation. We knew in advance that we could not screw anything into the location’s ceiling, so I was relieved to find that the room had a nice, chunky picture rail all the way around. In a night scene with practicals, it’s not so simple. When shooting a day interior, you can easily stick a huge light outside the window and then shoot pretty much anywhere in the room, crabbing the light to one side or the other if it threatens to come into shot or cast a shadow of the camera. On a practical level – if you’ll excuse the pun – I knew that the need to hide lights that would boost the apparent output of the practicals would limit my options in the wide shots, and therefore also in the close-ups which would of course have to match.
And a cozy look suggests practicals like table lamps, which by their nature cast pools of light and leave other areas in darkness. At the same time, the dialogue-driven script had moments which hinted at darkness and suffering in the past of both characters. Sophie wanted a soft, warm and cozy look to the short, which is set over a single night, mostly in one room, and tells how a teenage girl and an older man become unlikely friends. Night Owls was one of the first projects I shot on my Blackmagic Production Camera, and you can read what I thought of the camera in action in this post from May 2014.
So this is the perfect time to finally publish this look at the decisions and techniques I used in lighting and lensing the film. Thirdly, my work on the film won me Best Cinematography at the Festigious International Film Festival. As usual for no-budget shorts, there followed a long postproduction and then a festival run (it premiered at London Short Film Festival this January) which prevented us releasing any footage online.īut this week a number of great things have happened for the film. Firstly, Night Owls has been released online – you can see it here – and every view counts towards Promofest’s “Short of the Year” competition, so have a watch and help us win! Secondly, the film won an Honourable Mention and Best Actor (Jonny McPherson) at the LA Film Awards. I wrote the bulk of this post over two years ago, when I wrapped photography on Sophie Black’s short drama Night Owls.
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