advice needed on lighting

[drew123]

I'm planning on making a cheap zombie flic, low budget to no budget. I do plan on renting a good digital camera (canon xh-a1) and i will, if I have to, fork over some more cash for sound. Anyway my question is about lighting I plan on shooting in the forest behind my house, which means it's fairly shady. Do I need lighting? If so what are some good, cheap solutions? I also want to have some night scenes. How do I handle that? Can I just shoot it in the day and put it through some kind of filter to make it look like night. Don't feel obligated to answer all of these questions if you don't want, just answer what you feel like, anything has to help because besides having a slight knack for the special effects and storytelling/scripting end of things i'm completely clueless.

 

[grinner]

I like harsh, cheap, battery powered LEDs, especially when doing anything horror related. You can find all kinds of affordable and admitidly cheezy solutions. I often wear a dimmable LED headband that allows me to change color temp on the fly and I like to accent my surroundings with bike LEDs, flashlights and cheap camcorder lights. Great for backlighting certain areas of focus in the woods or in a creep old house. You can get an idea for it looks like here:
http://vimeo.com/12597766

 

[drew123]

thanks festival that link was really informative, and thanks to you as well grinner, I'll definately try to employ some of those techniques. Oh and by the way, and this has nothing to do with the thread, I decided renting a camera was a stupid idea, I saw on ebay the canon gl 1's are going used for like 500 bucks, that a $2,000 PLUS camera, repeat a $2,000 PLUS camera, now granted it's not as professional a piece of equipment as the one I was thinking about renting, but frankly I'm probably going to make one bumbling, fumbling village idiot of a camera man anyway, so it's doubtfull I'd really be able to appreciate the difference. Besides anything has to be better than the one I've been doing my little shorts on, don't know what type it is, it's my cousin's but it's just a little cheap thing with absolutely no resolution on it. I did this scene where a zombie, played by your's truly ate a hapless victim, it looked awesome, looked as good as anything you'd see on a movie but the stupid camera couldn't pick up all the blood and guts because of my red shirt I was wearing, and the image was so pixalated that all those carefully grafted guts I was pulling out looked like amorphous pixalated blobs.