Response to Lighting

My brother and I just finished shooting a short film on DV and are now in the editing phase. We rented a VX-1000 at $165/day so we didn't have much money for lights. All shots with talent were to take place indoors so first off I replaced all off the fixtures used in our locations with 160watt (I think) Phillips Halogena bulbs. These gave a much cooler (higher color temp) cast than any other bulb I've seen. We also got two of these dual-head halogen work lamps for about $40 a piece. They can stand about 6' tall and are really bright. We used them mainly with blue gels to simulate moonlight, both for exterior illumination and for moonlight streaming through windows. Though it's of limited use we also got this flourescent tube light (1' long) to act as an effect light. The cool thing is that it gave a blueish/violet cast, not green as I expected. With the VX-1000 set to its Tungsten white balance preset we got nice _white_ light out of the halogenas and rich fleshtones with very dramatic, saturated colors from the effect light, gel'ed halogens and overhead flourescents. We purposely shot using uncorrected flourescents for effect, lighting talent with the halogens to keep them from looking green. The result is quite striking, with greenish light on environment but nice, reddish fleshtones. We could always use more lights but for about a $250 investment we were very happy with our results.

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