This week our group did a test shoot in the location we’re hoping to shoot in. We decided to go at night, when we want to shoot our final project, but we didn’t bring any lights with us. We wanted to get a sense of the natural lighting in the environment and what kind of lights we would need to bring to emphasise the look when we shoot.

We started off with a tracking shot from outside the restaurant, of our two actors leaving their table and walking out of the building towards the car park. Darcey has been able to book the same table for us next week when we shoot again. The light already inside the restaurant is very bold, and adding more lights to the current set-up would be unnecessary.

We quite like the contrast between the red light of the restaurant and the cooler light coming from the car park. We could potentially place lights on the other side of the street to try to make the actors stand out more against the dark background, but this may be difficult to achieve.

I really like the blurred headlights in the back of this shot. We’re not 100% sure whether or not we will be shooting in this car park again, but if we are, I think it’d be really cool to attempt this shot again but using a light with a red gel to make the red coming from the neon light much stronger.

For the interior car shots, we are planning to use the gels make the car feel like it is much closer to the restaurant than it really is. This will dramatically alter the feel of the scene, however I do like the look we were able to achieve with the available light, as well as the torches from our phones.

 

We also attempted this technique of using our phone torches to see what we might be able to achieve with better lights for the interior two shot, however this was less effective for this shot as the light looks far too directionally, rather than being dispersed across the windscreen. Hopefully this will look far better when we not only have bigger lights, but also have dispersion material to refine the look we want.

We also attempted a shot from outside the windscreen looking in. Because of the reflection that the glass causes, we had a little less control over the framing as we were more occupied with avoiding reflections of the camera or lights.

When we try this shot again, we firstly want to clean the windows to make it look more like the camera is on the dashboard and windscreen less obvious, but we also might want to try to avoid some of the lens flares we got in the first attempt while using the phone torches.