Hi I'm Josh!
And I'm Kirstie.
Today we're going to talk about filming so that it looks like you're in a dark room.
Lets do this!
Don't actually try to film in the dark.
Your camera needs light to work, and it needs a lot of light to work really well.
So even if you're shooting something that's meant to look like a dark room, you are going
to need lights.
You can try and do a load of this in post, but it's just going to be a lot of pain and
it's not going to look anywhere near as filmic.
It might seem weird to recreate a dark room by using lighting techniques, but actually
if you think about when you walk around a fairly dark room, you're still able to see
certain things and that's because there is ambient, diffuse light in there.
But it's not enough for a camera to pick it up.
So the lights that you've already got for your filmmaking can be used for this, but
probably not in the way you typically use them.
So instead of pointing them directly at the talent, what you want to do is maybe bounce
them off something.
You can bounce them off the ceiling, the white ceiling here would work really well, but that
would create a down light which maybe wouldn't feel like an ambient light, like it was coming
in through the windows or something like that.
So instead, considering bouncing them off a wall, that will give them a really nice
soft light with no real understanding of what direction it's coming from.
Bouncing light like this is really going to give you a great ambient light.
What it might not work so well for is if you're trying to do a really detailed shot of a face
and someone's expression.
And in those cases, you just need to throw more light at it.
Another thing you're going to want to consider is the settings of your camera.
Now as we've discussed before, the main issue you're going to have is that you don't have
enough light in your scene and one of the ways you can counteract this is to open up
the aperture in your lens.
This is going to give you a shallower depth of field which may or may not be what you
want.
But another option is to change the lens on your camera, particularly if you've got a
DSLR.
Again, artistically this may not be what you want but you can put on a faster lens and
it'll let in a lot more light.
If you can't do this, your last port of call is to raise the ISO.
Now, I know we always recommend that you should stay at your native ISO but unfortunately
this is one of the situations where we may have to break that rule.
If you raise the ISO up, the sensor is becoming more sensitive, so this means it will all
get brighter.
Fantastic.
But NO.
It will also add noise and noise is often the enemy.
But consider this, maybe it's not.
If you've seen the film Collatoral, there's tons of noise in that.
So, maybe noise isn't so bad - no, it is, it's bad, it's terrible.
I hate noise.
Get rid of it.
Don't do it.
Use your artistic license, is what we're trying to say.
Friends.
So what do you do if you've filmed your scene, you've got noise in your footage because you
had to up the ISO and in doing so, completely defied everything Josh said?
Well, we know sometimes you have to up the ISO.
Im not going to pretend that you don't need to, we do it ourselves, it has to happen.
So, once you've got the noise in there, it's never going to be as perfect as if you could
have solved this in camera.
But the solutions on the market are really good.
HitFilm Pro has one inside it, and there's a tutorial with Simon here that shows you
how to denoise your footage.
But, if you're using other software, NeatVideo, they make an excellent plugin for getting
rid of noise.
It takes time, but it does really great results.
A faster solution potentially is Red Giant's denoiser plugin which I know the guys over
at Film Riot absolutely love.
So, there's many to pick from but they all cost money, they all take time and you're
better off solving this in camera if you can.
If you like it subscribe, we have new filmmaking tips and tutorials every Tuesday.
And do comment down below, we love to hear what you guys think, or talk to us on Twitter.
See you in a couple of weeks.
Bye!