If you want awesome video of your lead singer walking along a mystical, foggy, steaming river with dramatic orange lighting, you have three basic choices. Find such a river, find footage of such a river, or re-create it yourself.
If re-creation is your choice, you have a lot of work to do. If you can find such a river, it’s bound to only be mystical and foggy at dawn.
If you choose to re-create it, instead of the sun, you’d need all your lights grouped together like they’re one incredibly bright source. Use orange color gels and lower all your light stands so the light strikes your singer at a 90° angle. Place your fog machine so the light hits the fog from behind or the fog will hardly show, no matter how much your machine cranks out. Smoke needs to be back lit in order to show well on film or video.
The same is true for smoke or rain; it must be backlit to show well.
An interesting tidbit of film history is an easy way to illustrate this technical fact. During the filming of Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock tried to take advantage of a real rainstorm that came up unexpectedly. He had to trash that work and re-shoot, staging the rainstorm and taking the time to place his back lights first! After all, you need your audience to see the rainstorm, and as real as wet shoes were to the folks doing the filming, no rain showed on film so it might as well not have existed. (The other lesson here is that even the masters make mistakes.)
Of course, the savvy producer has a third, fourth, and even a fifth option for the singer-on-the-mystic-river look.
3. Buy great stock footage of a mystic river Green Screen your singer onto stock footage No shoes in muddy river bank Relatively inexpensive
4. Send one poor sucker out to get the river footage at 4:30 am Green Screen your singer over sucker’s footage Give the dedicated photographer with muddy shoes a day off! Inexpensive
5. Animate the mystic river Green Screen your singer over your animation Go wild with imagination Can be terribly expensive Whether you re-create the world in a sound stage, on a hard drive or simply take advantage of what exists outside your window, it pays to know what makes things look the way you want them to look. That way, you can more effectively transfer your vision from your brain to a video monitor.
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