Faking Moonlight

[kalari Jack]

Hey,

Its me again with another 'faking' question. This is touching along the lines of my last post about shooting in a studio but this time I was wondering if I could get some tips on lighting setups for shooting in a studio to fake a full moon night.

I see the scene being quite abstract, with deep shadows and the character being lit by sliver of light.

I was planning on shooting day for night, but I've not done it before so if anyone has experience with this on the RED then please point me to potential pit falls. I was thinking of shooting it at 320 iso with the scene exposed to something similar to a sunset.

I would ideally like to keep this as simple as possible. The studio has full space lights so I could take advantage of this, but I've always seen moon light as being directional. What would be the best way to approach lighting a scene like this?

Again, thanks in advance.

[Matt W.]

A scene lit by moonlight, fully corrected for white balance and exposed normally, looks a lot the same scene lit by daylight, only with a purple tint and stars in the sky.

Here's a 30 second exposure I took yesterday of a house lit by moonlight, you can see it's a hard source, similar to the sun, so I disagree about the moon being a soft source (that said, it's often lit as such). Making tungsten lights look really orange sells the effect, I agree.

http://home.comcast.net/~mwauhkonen/b.jpg

In reality, the moon is a hard, full-spectrum source and the sky is always brighter than the foreground. In movies, the sky is usually black and the moon is represented by a desaturated (1/2 to full blue and desaturated in the grade) soft source. If you shoot day for night, put a blue filter on the camera and underexpose your key two stops, trying to avoid the sky as much as possible or putting grad filters over it and then pulling it even darker in post.

In the ask David Mullen thread there's a good post about moon light, where he suggests either side lighting one stop under and then using minimal soft fill, or 3/4 lighting at key and then filling a stop and a half under with a soft light. Side lighting with HMIs lined up perpendicular to the camera is the technique I use but it looks only okay, kind of "bleh" but efficient because you don't need too many lights. Another popular technique is simply using HMI balloons for the moon, but that's an expensive rental.

[dean merrill]

http://apogeecs.com/images/video/mmw/detail1.jpg

I did this shoot with a 4k shot through some trees, and a kino (4 bank i think) for fill. it worked well, but the 4K was a bit too much. 1/4 diffusion... not sure if it was a classic soft or promist.

Here is a link to the project with the clip and some photos:
http://apogeecs.com/video-mmw (http://apogeecs.com/video-mmw)

[David Battistella]

Matt,

I would just define all reflected light as soft as a point of terminaligy and maybe not hard fact. But I do not want to get into a discussion about symantics.

David

[Matt W.]

"Soft" and "hard" are relative terms. The "softness" of a light is related to one thing only, how big a light source looks from the perspective of where it's hitting, its size times one over the square of its distance from the subject. The only truly "hard" light is a point source, which does not exist in physics. Even open face lights are softened a bit by the reflector and length of the filament.

In reality, the moon is no softer than the sun, probably the hardest light source we usually deal with, and casts equally hard shadows. In movie lighting it's often portrayed as a soft source, but not always. If any reflected light is a soft source, then a fresnel or open face light is soft, too, since a fair percentage of its output is provided by the reflector behind it.

[David Battistella]

Thanks Matt.

It's a good discussion and a nice way to observe thinking.

David

[Mark Collins]

Faking moonlight is simple. HMI's, either with nothing in front of them or with a tough silk in front of them to spread the light out.

[Peter Mosiman]

Faking moonlight is simple. HMI's, either with nothing in front of them or with a tough silk in front of them to spread the light out.

Faking moonlight well, however, calls for much more care and finesses than just simply doing this setup. It's much more about the placement of the fixtures, the breaking up of the light so that it is not necessarily constant in brightness, and the amount of fill you use.

[David Mullen ASC]

I'll post again my photos shot under real moonlight:

Underexposed by almost three stops, with the camera set to 3200K:

http://www.davidmullenasc.com/moonlit1.jpg

http://www.davidmullenasc.com/moonlit2.jpg

Longer exposure:
http://www.davidmullenasc.com/moonlit3.jpg

Bottom line is lighting an interior for moonlight is basically like lighting for daylight, except there is less ambient skylight. However, depending on how much you underexpose your highlights, you may want to light to a lower contrast ratio IF you want shadow detail, simply because if your highlights are 2-stops under, let's say, and you decide that black is 5-stops under, then your shadows can't really be more than 2-stops below your key if your key is already 2-stops under IF you want shadow detail. Now you often want black shadows with hard moonlighting but occasionally you need to see into the shadow side, which is why some people light moonlight scenes like old b&w movies, with spotty areas of fill where it's needed rather than an overall wash of soft even fill -- so they can selectively bring out small parts of the frame, let other parts go black. It's rather stylized but then, moonlit scenes tend to be stylized.

[Matt W.]

Yikes, my camera did not behave like that at all (see above). I was shooting in really extreme cold, so maybe the tint is from the sensor acting up. Or it may just be the very different location geographically.

I think the one other thing to consider is that one's eyes go into scotopic vision at night, and so perceptually colors are muted pretty dramatically, and so what we see is very different from what a camera sees at night.

I also shoot for f2 or f2.8 when faking moonlight (day for night, interiors lit by fake "moonlight") because "real" night footage would be shot at that kind of stop. I also sometimes try (and invariably fail) to put a big white piece of bead board near the talent in close ups, not just for fill (wraps around skin nicely as a reflection) but also so that there is an eye light even if the skin is dark. Never works for me because I have terrible spatial skills and can never line it up, but it's cool (if unmotivated) when it works.

[dino g]

ill give you a super simple way to do this...use hmi's and set the color temp in camera to 2800k...works every time...

as far as ratios and contrast..always listen to david...

[kalari Jack]

Thank you all! This has really helped!

I'll be going for a HMI 1.2 k with a softbox to create the overall moon light, fill with a kenoflow. Shoot for day, two/three stops down. But as Peter mentions, a lot of it will be down to the finer adjustments.

David Mulled, you have made me think further about the finer details, I'll be sure to bear it in mind for the shoot. Thank you!