Inside at Night: Three Lighting Strategies

(Cinematic Lighting Lesson 11)

Summary: Lighting a night interior doesn’t have to be a daunting experience. If you follow these three lighting strategies you’ll be able to successfully create the right feel and mood of a interior night scene.

Length: 5:53 minutes


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8 replies
  1. price76
    price76 says:

    Hi guys 🙂

    Leaving the set light un-gelled and modulating the light as a technique. Could you explain what you meant by this, I gather you refer to dimming the balast to change color temp to your desired look?

    Cheers
    Dave

    • Tim
      Tim says:

      There are some DPs that like to add various blue gels to their “moon” since traditionally that was the way it was done (especially in the 1980’s). In this video Ryan demonstrates some of these looks, along with not adding any gels and letting the light CCT be the same as what the camera is white-balanced to. Ryan prefers keeping it white and simply adjusting the brightness of the “moon” to properly fit the scene and story. Too much light and it starts to feel like the sun; not enough, and it feels like there isn’t even a moon.

      While the color temp changes with some lights based on how bright the light it, this isn’t the best way to reliably adjust CCT since the change is very slight. Also, many traditional lights can’t be modulated very much and instead depend on ND gels and wire scrims.

  2. Rich49er
    Rich49er says:

    I practiced this on Friday but could not get it right. I placed the light to the side. I tried with a soft box and a hard light source. I put a highlight on the headboard and added a practical to one side. I recorded the scene with a slide movement. Unfortunately it didn’t look good. I experimented by dimming the lights and altering the ISO. Effectively they just offset each other. Please can you advise on how to get better results.

    • Tim
      Tim says:

      It’s hard to give advice without seeing what you’ve created. Could you post a screenshot or post a link to your video online? Or you can email us the screenshot/link directly: info [AT] indiecinemaacademy.com

  3. Ahmedsalem
    Ahmedsalem says:

    Thanks for the tutorial , I suggest you add a tutorial about night scene with blocking with long duration , you show us in it the making of the tutorial because night scenes illusion depends on controlling the spill of light , which we want to know to learn , this is missing manual in all of the books , and if indie achieve that it will be very great, also we want to know the lighting ratios in night scene

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