Checking Lighting with Lead Singer

After casting all the roles in the music video, we went to speak to Paul one of the technicians of the media department. He explained to us various things we would need to consider if using the flourescent light tubes. He told us that the the flouresent tubes may not be visible on the 'Black Magic' camera; He also said that because our singer has a darker skin colour that might also affect how the colours look on her. 

He also said that lighter skin usually reflects light with a more matte effect on the skin, whislt darker skin makes light reflect more shiny on the skin. Therefore, we came up with the solution of using powdered make-up that matches the singers complexion so that the light will relfect with a more matte appearence of her skin.

We tested the flourescent lights he already had and found they worked well on the Nandi's skin tone. 

On problem we did encounter was that on the 'Black Magic' camera, we needed to adjust the exposure enough so that the singer could be seen with the lights from the tubes. 

Due to flourescent lights not producing enought light for the singer to be seen, we increased the exposure. This caused the light tubes to look over exposed on the camera and have a zig-zag pattern on them. 

To combat this problem, we talked with Paul and decided on using an extra light with a coloured gel (pink or blue) and use that as the main lighting. This would make the artist visible and would also mean we could decrease the exposure level on the camera so that the colour on the flourescent tubes could be seen. This would create the illusion that the flourescent tubes are lighting her but in fact it would be an extra light behind the camera that would make her visible. 

As you can see we tested this with a bright white flourescent tube above the singer and it solved our problem.