When it comes to lighting in a video, it plays a very vital role in setting the mood. If the scenes in The Matrix where Neo arrives at the machine city were made to be in the daytime instead of a stormy night, it wouldn't have been as effective in showing how serious the machine city is. Granted, it looks like daytime for Neo, but not for us viewers. There's a scene in the movie The Time Machine where you literally can't see anything. You can hear someone walking through the woods, but you can't see anything but a black scene. It would have been pretty dramatic if could see even just a silhouette, but it ended up being just confusing because you're left to think that something is wrong with the screen.
There is something to that though. The darkness adds a bit of mystery to what's going on in the scene, if it's done right. When I did the Sick Disguise video, I knew I wanted to keep the mystery of the band and make people look close at who they are. At that point, I had the idea of using my stage lights to be the only source of light for the video and I was going to surround them in only those lights.
When I started creating the scene in my program, Chauvet ShowXpress, I started to realize how vital the light placements are. If i wanted to get the look I wanted, I needed to make sure that the lights were exactly how I placed them in my 3D view. For the first time, I'm going to let you see a clip of what I see when I program lights for a scene. Check it out below!
One thing you'll notice is how the beams of light really give the song an extra kick. I knew that when shooting day came, I needed to get those beams of light to show. A friend of mine, who had never shot a music video before, brought along his fog machine and we were able to make the beams of light visible to our cameras. This is a short clip of what it looked like when we were setting up the scene and testing the light sequence out.
The fog was the most important tool in this video, without it, the video wouldn't have had the same effect. The band loved it and I was happy that the work I had done was able to make the band satisfied. The rest of the day was a blast and we all had a good time. Check out the final results of the video below!
I hope you enjoyed the video and the behind the scenes look at how I set the tone for the music video. Be sure to subscribe to us for more content! Also, check out Armstrong and their latest music video for "Pray for Me" out now!
-Adam