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Also not Roger. But I did shoot a 70’s disco short and I had a similar idea. I used a similarly large soft source off to the side of the dancefloor but just for a little bit of fill light to pop the central characters, and I’m not sure I needed it honestly. You have to be aware that you are lighting a big area, so even an 8×8 is going to feel sourcy and the falloff will be noticeable. The things that I found handy shooting this scenario were when in close ups diffusion frames on those pars to soften them, and my own RGB panel to augment the pars from the floor.
Good luck it is a tricky scenarioI think it’s this experience of fighting at the margins to achieve something special that’s so interesting. To me one of the most fun parts of the job/game is when the margins of error are small, when your resources are limited and you can only ‘just’ make a vision happen (but you can!). The constraints of time and money push any production into this territory, no matter how fast the film speed, or efficient the lights are, how big a project. Your story of lighting the basin in NCFOM is a good case in point.
I think people like me are fascinated by the history because you all worked with such slimmer margins, that you had to hone all your skills of calculation and knowledge of the tools that much more. (It is nice we don’t have to worry about melting an actor’s face off anymore)
That transition into using soft-light more generally seems like a concrete example of you guys doing the math each movie, and finding successively along the way that hey, we can now ‘just barely’ do this awesome thing, let’s do it.Thank you again for sharing your thoughts
While it would be so nice to have unlimited time to experiment, refine and perfect on the day, the race against time is part and parcel, and part of the fun too.
As you say lighting softly is more forgiving. And as its *generally* prettier and more ‘naturalistic’, its a wonder that the lighting style took so long to take hold, even though they had the firepower to achieve it even back in the days.
Thank you for your reply and again for providing this forum.
