29Apr CHAUVET LED Pinspots for that undead look
I was working on the set of a horror feature last week, shooting in an old warehouse. The scene we were working on required our actress to come into view out of the darkness in undead makeup and the director asked if I had anything that would emphasize the dead and pale look that our makeup artist was going for.
The lighting kit we were using on set was 3200K and the cameras were set to 4000K to give the crates and pallets scattered around the warehouse a warmer look. To bring out the dead look of our actress in makeup I decided to go with a few of these LED Pinspots from Chauvet. The color temperature of these little LED spot lights is somewhere near 6500K which ended up giving our actress a nice pale hue.
To soften things up just a bit and defuse the light, I also grabbed a small smoke machine. Filling the area with a bit of smoke gives nice visible beams of light and provides just the right amount of haze. The smoke also does a great job of naturally blending in prosthetic applications like this neck wound.
One LED Pinspot was aimed at her right shoulder from about 4 feet up on the right hand side of the actres. The other LED Pinspot was directed up from the floor towards her chest to give dark contrasting shaddows. To get the background to drop into darkness we simply moved the scene 10 feet away from the back wall and under exposed the shot by a few stops. The result is this reasonably believable yet disturbing undead creature walking out of the darkness.
The LED Pinspots don’t have a perfect color profile by any means and they often give you a purple cast around the final beam of light. But if you employ them in a horror film setting, they do a great job of making it feel like there’s a beam of moonlight cutting through a scene. The LED Pinspots also do a great job if you need to make an object appear to be glowing in an otherwise low contrast area. At $38 a peace the LED Pinspots are one of the cheapest spots available and well worth checking out if you’re in the market for this kind of look.
April 29th, 2013 at 6:22 pm
Looks nice. What about using this spots lights to use as (don’t know how to say in english..) “hair light” in interviews? With some rosco gels to match color temperature..
April 29th, 2013 at 8:14 pm
You probably could use them for highlights. They come with gels but you’d probably want to cut some out of nice material.