Lighting a night bonfire scene
 

I am shooting a scene for my feature that I need a little help on equipment wise. The scene is set in an open field at night, with a bonfire being the main point of action. Two actors stand by it and drop something in to burn it.

The sky is really the limit as far as budget, but crew and time are a factor, so no balloon lights. I am looking to rent from CSC in New York.

Obviously, there needs to be a strong moon source. Would my best best be an HMI? If so, what wattage? I am also thinking of peppering the background woods with some smaller fixtures.

As far as lighting the talent, I'm not sure. I want the flames to be a main source of key light, so how should I punch up the glow? Any suggestions would be very helpful, so thanks in advance.

It depends on the size of your field, but it sounds like you'd be using a 12K HMI, perhaps more units depending on your location. Using them as backlight across the the field works really well, for best effect a hoist of some sort would really help create a moonlight effect. You can use Kinoflos for moonlight fill.

For the bonfire light, you can use gelled tungsten lights - orange or CTO according to taste and you can apply a flicker effect.

You can use the light from the bonfire, they're usually bright enough

Since you say budget isn't a great concern, I'd echo the idea of bringing in MORE light for the trees/backgrounds rather than less.

My thinking would be that in today's NLE editing era, if my original scenes had MORE light and background definition then I wanted in post - I could always use garbage mattes and digital correction to dim and de-emphasize any part of an overlit background I don't like. But if the background isn't reflecting enough light in the first place, there's nothing you can really do to bring it up.

So this is a case where more might actually be more.

Something to think about anyway.

Good luck.

Then rather than guessing and throwing your money away for a shot that might not come out. Do it right... Hire a grip truck and lighting director.

No real necessity for a strong moon source as you suggested, as you will have plenty of contrast in the scene due to the bonfire itself and the scene will play more realistically without a cool backlight. Giving the trees in the background a pop will indeed add depth--you can use Molepars or open face 1ks as uplights, or rake a length of trees with larger units.

Intriguing that you have an unlimited budget for gear but not for crew...? Cabling for the units in the background will take quite a while, you'll still need a bunch of guys for this especially if you intend to shoot in multiple directions.

You can augment your bonfire lighting with some larger units on variacs.

If it's only a couple of wide shots you could shoot at dusk, with the trees barely silhouetted against a near black sky (usually an extremely dark blue) with the bonfire burning in the field. Leaving the camera on tungsten preset, it's a matter waiting for the best moment for the best balance of the sky and the bonfire - it can look extremely effective.

You can then move in for your close shots as required.

Careful when trying to use the flames to illuminate the subject, particularly if you are also trying to keep the fire in the image. The light reflected off the faces might be several stops darker than the flames and it might be difficult to get an overall correct exposure. You might want to use some Fresnel lights to bust the lighting from the fire. You might need to experiment with red or orange color gels depending what your lights will be, tungsten (3200K) or HMI (5600K). The color of flames is about 1800 degrees Kelvin.

2 80ft condors ... 2 6k HMI pars ... 2 12kHMI fresnel ... 6 1200 par HMI's ...
and assorted tungsten 200- 2K's and i'm pretty sure i can light it any way you want it without seeing the script or scouting the location .....

Thanks for all the replies guys. The reason the budget isn't a concern and crew is, is that my friend is very wealthy and pretty much shooting this in his free time. I'm helping gaff, but since we're shooting over Christmas, the availability of crew is obviously limited.

I'll definitely run all these suggestions past him.

The field is pretty big, I'd say about a football field's worth of open space surrounded by trees. The action is very condensed to one area according to him, so I'm going to be discussing with him how wide he wants the master shots.

Forgot to add, that we WILL have a sizable crew, just mostly film students and not actual pro's so complex set-ups is something I'd like to avoid, otherwise, I'm gonna talk to the DP/Producers and look into hiring some freelance G+E guys for the day.

I heard someone explain how they shot a night-time campfire scene once. They didn't have any trees in the background (just an open grassland), so they didn't have to worry about that, but what they did do is shine some fresnels THROUGH the fire onto their subjects. Worked very well - I saw the end result.

Rent the movie and look at the campfire scene of Mel Brook's Blazing Saddles, just forget about the sound effects.

That will give you a good idea of how the lighting on a similar set-up was done.

"what they did do is shine some fresnels THROUGH the fire onto their subjects."

That is exactly what I did but with one of those super bright battery powered spotlights. They are the ones that use car headlight batteries and cost about $30. I used diffusion and put the light below the camera and to the right aimed through the fire. I framed the fire to the right and the talent a bit to the left. It turned out just fine. Don't forget that you probably need to use full CTO or more to match tungsten to fire.