Lighting a bus interior (Night scene)

[Dennis de Pijper]

Hi All,

It has always been a pleasure to read on this forum, this will be my first time posting here.

I’m exchanging some ideas with my director on the following topic:
Our next short will mostly take place in a moving bus (coach) (NITE/INT).
Because the bus will drive trough a non-urban area, seeing nothing but darkness outside contributes to the story.

Physically driving the bus might be a way to go, we could rig additional battery powered LED lights in the ceiling, making use of passing street lights to experience movement and color contrast.

Though I would prefer a more controlled stationary (studio) approach.
In order to make this happen we would need to rig gelled lights outside the bus to recreate the street light's movement, I do however have no experience on moving these lights in a controlled and repetitive way.

I would love to hear about people’s past experience and ideas on this, maybe with a completely different approach, I’m open for anything.

Many thanks in advance,

Dennis de Pijper
Cinematographer, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

 

[Brendan H. Banks]

Definitely many ways to go about it. I personally opt for the more "real" approach but to each their own.

If you want to go studio, lots of people will pan and tilt fresnels around in a pattern that feels right. I've also seen some folks put lights on sliders or use complicated DMX board presets to really quickly fade across LED panels.

One that might be interesting to explore is projection, it's one I've thought about before. You could go out and shoot some footage of passing lights/scenery and then project that outside the window and use that in conjunction with your panning/tilting lights. This would require a lot more coordination because your lamp operators will have to be working in tandem with a pre-recorded projection.

Also, if you don't subscribe to American Cinematographer, I might suggest it. You can access a backlog of stuff online and maybe it could help..even if not just for this scenario but general knowledge. I usually devour each issue within a day or two of receiving and it's worth the cheap subscription.

 

[Dennis de Pijper]

Hi Brendan,

Thank you for your reply on this!

The projection idea reminds me on a BTS I saw on Oblivion (DP Claudio Miranda), the effect was amazing, though we would need to find out what sort of projection screen they used.
Having a bus with large windows might complicate things quite fast.

We'll have to shoot some test footage for the ''real'' deal since I'm very interested how stable we can get the camera with an easyrig.

I've been subscribed to the ASC magazine for half a year now, I didn't know you could go into the online archive, thanks for the heads up!


Your personal project is amazing, I loved it.

Greetings,

Dennis