Lighting a car in a garage
 

hmm.. this is wierd.
so i hope ur minds are a lil out of the box when ur reading this..

im wanting to expand my horizons and i have a great concept for a short film of about 6 minutes..

its all one take, and its a side on shot of a guy sitting in a car, and i want it to LOOK like hes driving...
but hes not..

All u see are the top of his hands, and his profile and the driver window.. Thats all u see..

Looking like hes driving, but having a static vehicle, i want to add some moving lights.. to give that feeling of motion..
Im also adding sound effects to accentuate that motion, but i deliberately DONT want the car to actually LOOK like its moving.. just the lights and the sound..
I dont want the car to move AT ALL as this is a coneptual element which concludes the piece..

Anyways, I dont want it to look like hes actually out on the street.. i need the stark blackness with just some shades of colour flashing in his face and through the windows..

Now i was thinking of gettin some flashlights and puttin some gels on the them and then having people lay beside the car, on the side of the door outside the driver window and slowly pan these lights to give it a strange feeling of movement.. but not....

i also thought about using some disco scanner lights but i thought these would be too powerful..

Sound will also play a part, but i have that down.. no problem..

Now i have 2 DVX100's but only one will be used. i just want it to feel like a passanger is in the car with the driver..
I have a lowel total light with brella (which is too bright for something like this i think.. 500w and 800w ) a Sachler reporter 75 which is flaky, a Luxman 35w with dichroiiic and a standard 20w video lamp ( i usually do events.. not shorts hence the lighting rig is not ur standard kinda 3point kit.. )

so what do u think would work?
Do u think i should Chromakey the whole scene??
I really didnt want to do that.. as its adds another element to the proceedings and i thnk it would take away from the final conclusion... i want it to feel a little clostrophobic and dream like compared to the reality of a real life road..

I want his face to be half lit with fluctuating colour so i was thinging of some blu, red and yellow LED lights for the dash board (out of shot)..
I also considered those multicolour Rave party glowsticks to throw some colour softness in there (these look pretty good surprisingly) and the lux of these wont be a problem considering the proximity of the camera to the subject...

Does any of this make any sense?? LOL

What would u do??

Since it is such a short production both in running time and the shoot, I would do it both ways (chroma and lighting method). That way whichever turns out the way you want it to look will be the winner. You could possibly even use portions of both shoots as the final product.


If you are shooting in a garage you may want to use the railing of the garage door opener for possible lighting points. You can string up say, five lights. Then to give the illusion of motion, time the lights right so the car appears to be moving by them. If that made sense...?

yup, that made sense :) never thought of that.. bascially setting up a chain of lights to fire off in consective order.... hmm..

sounding better every time :)

thanks dude!!!

No problem, I have a vehicle scene coming up using green screen. To try and make it as real looking as possible we thought about using the rail and light system (to bounce off of the glass in head on shots) along with the footage on the green screen in post. Timing was the issue, that was a possible solution we discussed. Christmas lights and some black tape may be a cheap method too.

I know this is an old post and you may have filmed already...but after reading this I had an idea I think would add something.

Maybe you should do a shot of the passenger or driver, and use some sort of neon sign and have it reflect off the windshield. The reflection will move slowly up the window as though they are driving past it.

Even if you have filmed already, you may be able to edit a fake one in if you have a front angle shot like that.