How I lit a dramatic night time car scene | Cinematic lighting tutorial
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 มิ.ย. 2024
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Steve Ramsden here with DIY Moviemaking and this week I’m going to show you how to easily and cheaply light a dramatic and cinematic night time scene set in a parked car - just like you’ve seen with Ryan Gosling in Drive and Daniel Craig in Skyfall. So if you want to try something similar on a budget, then stick around!
Lighting kit used:
- Aputure C300D II light: www.aputure.com/products/ls-c...
- Light Dome II: www.aputure.com/products/ligh...
- Neewer light panels: www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...
- Light stands: www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...
- CTB and Deep Amber gel: www.leefilters.com/
- Red Coloured gel: www.amazon.co.uk/DECARETA-Cor...
In my film we have a scene with two actors, who secretly meet in the car and discuss something shady, so it seemed like a good excuse to create a fun moody lighting design. First for our key light, meaning our main light on the actors, I wanted to try and create a soft orangey glow to look like a sodium street light, and you can see this used quite a lot in films set in urban environments. For this I used my Aputure C300D Mark II light with the Light Dome II attachment, and clamped several orange gels inside it to create the correct colour. If you can find some CTO gel (meaning Color Temperature Orange), this will be a good start, but you will probably need quite a few sheets of it to create a deeper orange. In the end I combined some CTO with a few sheets of another gel called Deep Amber, and when held up to the light source it really kicked in lots of warm orange and looked pretty good. We set up the Aputure light on a C-stand with a sandbag, and placed it off to the left side of the camera, and you’ll see later on there was a good reason for putting it there.
Now you might be saying “I don’t have a fancy Aputure light, what can I use that is more basic or cheap?” and if you are just starting out with lighting, you can do a lot worse than buying a set of three LED light panels like this kit which I got from Neewer. I’ve found if you have an LED panel with some barn doors on it, if you want to create something similar to the light dome, you can make a pretty good cheap soft box by just adding something as some diffusion over the front. Just put your coloured orange gels inside first, and you should get a pretty similar look to what I did.
The main other light to think about is a back light, and I will often make the back light a different colour temperature to my key light to create some colour contrast. This way you have a warm light on the face, and a cooler back light around the hair or the edge of the face. For this scene I just used one of my light panels set on the coolest colour temperature which is the daylight setting or 5600, and I angled it in from the back and on the opposite side to the warm soft light. You could also raise this cool backlight up higher and pretend it is moonlight, though in our urban scene it was just meant to be another light on a nearby building.
Next, as a bit of fun we added a third light with a cheap red gel over it to look like the car’s tail lights, and added a nice extra colour into the frame.
So using this lighting design we didn’t have to move much to shoot the whole scene. We started off by filming our master shot from the front of the car. For the side shots, the background was a little dim and not very interesting, so we set up our third LED panel light and shone it at the storage containers in the distance behind. We wanted Matthew’s character to be a little more mysterious than Phil’s character in this scene, so we deliberately kept him more in the shadows and shone less of our key light on him, and it almost becomes a backlight.
Then to fill in some of these shadows and to add a little catch light into the eyes, I re-angled that cool LED panel at the back of the car a little, brought it closer and dimmed it down a bit. This just added some soft illumination onto the other side of Matthew’s face. and another easy way to do this is to just shine a torch or a phone onto a piece of polystyrene and bounce this light back into your actor’s face. This gave a really nice, dark, mysterious feel to Matthew’s shot.
And so that’s how we lit our car scene to hopefully look like a Hollywood movie. So you can always use this lighting plan as a starting point when trying your next short film project. And if you want to learn more about low budget filmmaking you can of course check out my full courses at DIYmoviemaking.com - ภาพยนตร์และแอนิเมชัน
This is becoming my favorite TH-cam channel. Quality information
Thanks, very kind - lots more to come!
Your tutorials are brutal bro!! Thank you very much!!!!
Again, a great tutorial. Thanks for all that work. I learn from each of your videos.
You're welcome!
wow, great tutorial!!
Awesome we want to see more lighting tutorials
Keep up the good work bro I'm starting to like this TH-cam channel, quality informations.
love it! so clear and useful.
Glad to hear!
Super bro Fan From India
Very nice! Would love to see more lighting tutorials.
Thanks, more to come along with the usual videos! 😀
excellent work, by far! :)
Thank you!
This is very helpful,,,,, thank you
Glad it helped!
Please share more videos about camera movements for specific purposes
Hey Amigo You are the Best
Love from India❤️💕
Thanks, best wishes
Nice breakdown of how to shoot a simple, yet useful scene to set the mood of the film. As for the Aputure 300d alternatives, theres the Amaran lights, which are basically Aputure's entry line of lights with plastic shells instead of metal, i recently got the Amaran 60d which is very tiny yet it packs quite a punch, great light that also can be powered with NP-F style batteries since it comes with a battery power source adapter. And since this model is small, you can also save money on buying a regular light stand instead of a C-stand, same with a softbox, i got the Light Dome II mini on it, a bit "expensive" for Amaran lights maybe, but the magnetic gel mount is just so good it just couldnt let it pass, works great but definetly i wouldnt mount a bigger modifier on it, but im pretty sure the 100 and 200 series could handle the regular Light Dome II with no issues, definetly keep an eye on them since they are the cheaper Aputure 120D. Make sure to add weight on the light stands, nobody wants their lights go flying on a windy day.
Hope this helps!
Great tips here! Thanks
Looks great! One thing I think that might improve this one step further: Notice how in Drive the shadow side of his face is near the camera? They did do split lighting which is different, but I think if you were to flip your lighting to put the hard shadows (orange) near the camera and the soft fill away from the camera (teal) it would achieve more of that dare I say "cinematic" quality! Just my *two cents*
Love your tutorials. I even made a short from learning through your tutorials. Love from India🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳♥️♥️
Great to hear!
شكرا لك ❤🌹
ان بحب فديوهاتك
انا من مصر🇪🇬
If you want cheap defusing material go to a garden centre and get the fleece they use to protect plants from frost. Some places sell it by the metre some have it pre packed.
But only use it on LeD lights unless you have it mounted on a frame (overflow pipe with push-on elbows) then put on a separate stand with a an articulating arm then you can use tungsten lighting. The further away the defuser is from the light source the softer the shadows. Btw Excellent videos.
Great tips!
Please make a video on mobile video editing iPhone or android btw appreciate your work !
Really good shots!! How do you avoided the reflection of the lights on the windscreen and Windows?
Yes I was worried about that beforehand, but in the end there weren't any visible due to the angle of the lights, and we were able to play the scene with the windows up. Having a long lens and shooting wide open might have helped too, as any reflections would have been made blurrier 👍
Just a tip. If you had set the camera lower on the two shot from the front of the car, you could have picked up more of the hood of the car in the foreground, creating a shot with much more depth. The shot looked pretty flat as is. Sometimes, it’s not just a matter of lighting. Creating depth requires foreground, subject, and background. Otherwise, well done!
For sure 👍
شكرا للترجمة العربيه واهتمامك بنا العرب
Which camera were you using
Could you please do a tutorial for lighting a medieval scene with candles like in LOTR or Game of Thrones?
That's a great idea
@@SteveRamsdenTH-cam I’m glad you think so! It would be very helpful for aspiring fantasy filmmakers
Do james bond gunbarrel tutorial
I just got your feed mail and here.
Great to hear!
What's the name of your short films
Time to make a movie
🙌
@@SteveRamsdenTH-cam I'm an audio guy so I need to step up my lighting game
My email sent me here!
Glad the mailing list works haha!
@@SteveRamsdenTH-cam same lol