Martha Low asks “I need to know the best way to shoot flames – the script calls for “at night.” I have a studio that is willing to have a fire set in it – how do you “light it?” What are some lighting tips to show fire at its best? Also, some shots need to be outside – should I aim for well-lit evening light and color correct in post to make it look dark? Or do I go for a special effects “fire file” – where would I get one for cheap or free? Oh yeah, no budget and needs to be in High Def. Thanks! – Martha”

and then adds

“oops! Sorry, asked a question before fully reading. I’m looking for videotaping techniques (not film buff stuff). – Martha”

which is why Chris is answering this one…

Hiya Martha. Fire is a wonderful beast to shoot, as fascinating in the viewfinder as it is to simply stare at. Maybe it’s the flickering nature of the light, the constant change, that draws us in to simply watching the flames. Much like TV can distract completely. And so, onto videoing it. To make it look it’s best you just need to point the camera at it. Being a source of light you don’t need to light it.

Ok, so that’s being a bit fatuous. Obviously I’m expecting you have actors in the scene and you want to light them – which does depend as much on your camera and on how big you want your fire to be. If it’s an embers sort of fire then you’ll need to add extra light to imitate the flicker of the fire. However a larger fire shot on the Canon 5DmkII would give enough light for the actors’ faces without any recourse to extra lights. I recently shot a scene lit almost entirely by candlelight, using a dozen candles in one room and two dedo lamps for low-level shafts of moonlight coming through the windows, and the 5DmkII worked well with this. Below are two examples of stuff shot on a Canon 5DmkII – firstly by our friend and camera operator Chris Storrar and secondly the candlelit scene which I shot for the fantastic director Lorna Love. Both of these are for music videos and I’ve literally just ripped a few shots from the rushes to show you examples. They’re entirely ungraded.

As you’ll see from the stuff Chris Storrar shot of the fire, if it’s a decent level you’ll get a nice glow on people’s faces – if they were sitting down next to the fire you’d be good to go. In terms of cameras the Nikon D3 is apparently even better in low-level light (though can only shoot 720p) – Zacuto have produced some great videos to show off how DSLRs and film work with low-level light.

If you’re using other cameras you may need more fill light. This can be done in different ways, which has been discussed pretty well at Roger Deakin’s brilliant forum, which I’d urge you to have a scout round – likewise cinematography.com. Another way of creating flickering light on people’s faces would be to use tin foil, or any reflective silver material, which you can scrunch up a little to create an uneven surface – bang your source light into this and have someone float it around in their hands and you’ll get wonderfully uneven light. They used techniques a little like this to get the amazing sun lighting in ‘Sunshine’. Would probably be best to use a frame for it so you had less noise coming from the foil when wafting it about.

But yup, it’s not hard to create a flicker on set. We’ve used one flicker filter before for our short short 0507:

This was to mimic the light of a TV, and we used Luca’s Light Flicker for this. Which obviously costs money, though not a huge amount at all. But quite a long render time. Set at a very low level, because it’s daytime and the curtains are open so the light from the tv wouldn’t be particularly pronounced, we also used a matte so it went only on the foreground. So a fair bit of work in post for something that can be done by gently waving a reflective board around…

It’s up to you whether you want backlight to give an edge onto the actors, perhaps a ‘moonlight’ type of thing, and likewise with how much of the background you want to see. If you go for the ‘only light from the fire’ route, then it can help on the wides to use some sort of silhouettes in the foreground to give a sense of depth – branches, logs, rocks, whatever, something out of focus.

By the sounds of it you want a black night sky. In which case let it be black. Don’t light for evening light, shoot it as is, let the light fall off. If you have to shoot matching shots outside then you only have a very small window to get dark blue skies, and a whole night to get black ones. Unless, of course, you’re hoping to see more of the locations you’re shooting, in which case dark blue skies are the way to go – once it’s black, it’s black, and you’ll see very little. To do that then you’re looking at shooting it with blues in the background on your studio shoot. However to make things match (and to disguise the fact you’re shooting in a studio) it would be a lot easier just to let the backgrounds fall off into black.

Hope this is of some small help. If you have any more questions don’t hesitate to ask.

Much love

Chris