Love Between Storeys

Lighting: The Doors and Their Cardboard Brothers

The doors to the elevator are actually two pieces of elevator ceiling that we decided to adapt to our own purpose. The metal pieces had rectangle shaped holes in it to let light flow through them, which suited our need for an extra light source quite well.

We covered the holes with diffusion gels and blasted light through them to create boxlike shapes into the elevator. Not only did this bring mood to the scene, but it actually provided us with something else: we’d be able to use this light to establish when the elevator moves. Having several shapes move across the actors looked way cooler than a simple line of light which you usually see being used in fiction.

In these two shots from the movie you can see the light boxes giving light to our actors:

I have to say that using the door as a light source makes no sense at all, but we didn’t care, and nobody in the audience has reacted to that either. It looked nice, so we went with it. The technique we used to shoot establishing shots of the characters when the elevator moves was to actually skip the huge metal pieces, and go with something way simpler. We created the cardboard brothers.

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When we wanted the elevator to move, we had two guys with their respective movie lamps, moving them vertically along the cardboard siblings. This cast a moving light into the elevator, causing it to seem like it’s moving up or down. This way we were able to place the camera where the doors are supposed to be.

Cardboard is awesome to create different shaped flags to block light since it’s cheap and easy to rig due to it’s weight.

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Continue to Lighting: The Floor Lights…