I am prepping a project where I will be shooting a band on a practice stage with several stage lights already in place. I am trying to achieve a nice polished look with the band members in mostly clean tungsten light and use some of the gelled lights for background.

What would be my best solution for keeping the band well lit and still get the live stage vibe. I have had several problems shooting under red and blue gels in the past and would like to avoid those as much as possible on this project. How would removing some of the colored gels and replacing them with diffusion work? I have a few omni's and a couple DP's I can also use to help out the lighting situation as well. Any suggestions on a good setup would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

I have attached a sample pic of the stage and current lighting setup.

Usual method is to use coloured gels in the back lights and on the background and use clean tungsten lights for the key. I'd tend to give each musician a key light. However, you could use light colour gels (eg 1/4 CTO or CTS or similar density colour gel) on the key lights if these look too "clean".

Diffusion tends to look a bit flat on stage unless you ensure that your key source is close to the subject and not too frontal. If you go too far back, you lose the diffusion effect and it tends to spread all over the stage unless you got flags to control it. The spread from the diffused light also tends to desaturate your colour effects. However, you could use very light frost on the key just to take a bit off the hard edge from the key lights without getting too much spread.

You can use large poly board(s) with bounced light for fill.

Brian,

Thanks for your advice. Thats pretty much what I'm looking for. I don't want all clean white light on the talent so I think the CTO or CTS gels would work good for the keys. The band has a 60's psychedelic rock sound so I want to smear most of the colored stage light onto the background elements of the stage giving it a kind of tie dyed effect. This is supposed to compliment the "acid trip" projection light hitting the rear wall. Thats our theory anyway. Just trying to find a way to make it all work together.

My suggestion is start by setting a rim (back) light on each musician. Since you have so much dark around the screen area, anything less than a solid rim light and you'll lose all sense of the musician's shape agains the background. I'd gel the rims based on the musician's hair color and/or outfits.

After you set rims for everyone, concentrate on fill of their faces with whatever you have left from in FRONT of the band. Small fresnels would be good for this, barn doored off the background and set lower than the overhead grid - to avoid the hollow eye socket look. (This kind of face fill is why theatres often use follow spots - which fill in faces evenly, if often way too harshly.)

So, you'll need to set at LEAST two lights per performer rim and key, in addition to whatever else you have for the background.

The nice "concert" look will come from keeping your keys from spilling on the screen and killing your psychodelic background.

That's a beginning, anyway.

Bill,

Thanks for responding. I like the idea of rim lights with different colored gels. I need to look at how much money is left in budget and do some shopping this weekend. I think the biggest pain is going to be keeping the alot of the light of the projection screen. We've got a decent rental house here so I am gonna look into some fresnel packages as well. Thanks again