Re: Shooting black and white on digital
brainflow said:
I'm shooting the film as black and white, kind of an old school Nike commercial feel to it.
I must be getting old... but I find it really funny when someone wants to make a b&w movie look not like a classic b&w movie, but like a modern TV commercial -- and then call that commercial "old school."
But, I need reccomendations for lights. What would be the best lighting to get a good, gritty black and white effect? I'm shooting in a gym, what is the best way to black out the background? Thank you.
If your background is black, how will people know it's in a gym? Generally you make a background black by not letting any light hit it. So shoot the gym at night and use harder, direct lights that only hit what you want to see, and flag it off the background. What sort of lights you use depends on how much power you have to draw on -- a commercial would probably use powerful 10K's and 20K's, etc. to create big spotlights (and perhaps smoke up the set) but assuming you wont be using a generator, you will be limited to lights that can be plugged into an outlet -- 1K's, 2K's, smaller...
If you're limited on power, one useful light is the 1K PAR64 Par or Parcan, which can be rented with wide, medium, spot, or narrow spot bulbs. Parcans have a metal tube extension that reduces the spill on the sides of the PAR light -- you see these in stage lighting.
But a lot of those commercials went with a much bigger lamp, like a 10K on a small crane to create a single big shaft of light coming from above the net, with atmospheric haze in the room from a large smoke machine. A cheaper substitute for a 10K might be a MiniBrute with spot globes, maybe on some scaffolding (parallels).
