Advice for BAR club scene Shooting

[Jason Balich]

HEllo,

I presently have a contract for a promoter downtown and want to get some good video of the club at night with everyone partying. Can u recomend the best light for this..maybe something that i can adjust brightness value of it and not to expensive for the GL2?

The little mini light for $50 wont do the trick i hear...just brighten faces abit.
Although i dont want to blind people' What should i know for this to make the best purchase? SHould i look into the VL-10Li Battery Video Light?

[Keith Loh]

There's one trick you can use for a sequence during your filming that is cheesy if you use it too much. This is when you lower your shutter speed to allow more light into your lense. Everything slows down but it makes poor dancers look hot and everyone looks good for the few seconds you do this. Any more time and it's a bit hard to watch.

Otherwise, there are always spots with lots of candy lights that you will provide enough illumination unless by bar you mean some kind of loungey place that has very little light. People far away from the dance floor will probably not show up very well but everyone on typical dance floor with disco lighting you should be able to get.

[Rik Sanchez]

If you can talk to the lighting staff and have them turn on all the different lights they have, not the house lights but the spinning lights, strobes, whatever special effects lighting they have, that would brighten things up and make it look very lively.

If you are attaching a light and moving through the crowd, having a light mounted on a camera gives a cheesy, home video look, have someone hold the light off to the side of you and so you'll move and they will be lit up but the light source stays in one place. I hate mounting a light on my camera and then if I walk through a crowd, the light moves with the camera and gives those weird shadows.

When I shoot in very dark places, I end up using a slow shutter but I go in and cut out the dark frames, all the frames that are well lit I keep so it ends up looking a bit jumpy and time lapse-like, but I don't use that footage for too long, just to add some fast action/editing to the footage. Usually a strobe or some other lights are flashing so I use that part of the footage.

Maybe also add a colored gel to the light so it looks like it's part of the club lighting. But since you are working with the promoter, you can get them to adjust the lights so the video looks good, a dark club might look cool when you are there but on video, you got to have the lights blazing away, I'm sure the promoter will understand.

whenever I shoot in a club, I always find the lighting staff and ask them what lights they have and if they can put them on, if only for a short time while I film.

let us know how it turns out.

[John Locke]

The one thing I hate is when a dance scene is lit too much with white light. It makes it look completely unlike a club when they do that.

If you have a couple of powerful lights, you can set them up to the side off the dance floor and gel them one color...like blue or green or red...and have those as your constant fills, then like Rik suggests have them turn all the blinking/spinning lights on, too. Or if they have a lot of black lights, turn those on as the constant.

Check out "Boys and Girls" and the dance floor scene that is lit with black lights...looks great (gad...I hate admitting that I watched that movie).

[Peter Moore]

It's funny you should ask about this. I filmed a short for a video called "Law Students Gone Wild" (showing how NOT wild law students are), where we went into a bar with a bunch of 3Ls. I was gonna use the VL-10 until I turned it on and everyone darted there eyes over to me like I was a police officer or something. So we went with no light, just manual exposure control: 1/30 shutter, 12db gain, 1.6f.

Honestly, it didn't look that bad at all, at least not for the effect we were going for. 18db would have been brighter but grainy as hell.

[Jason Balich]

THanks for the tips guys''

I understand what your saying about the light VL10. Damn!!! It is bright. I ended up buying it, thinking it would be good for the bar, but can imagine, like one of you said that it would be like a cop putting on a spotlight..and blinding as all hell. Could i get something to tone it down to still use it (piece of colored plastic filter)?

And if not, what is the best situations to use this bright light and how?

Thanks for the tip of the manual settings also, the DB of 18 would of wasted alot of timw filming with the output being grainynes.