How do you shoot at night?

A lot of the content for Haunted was shot during the night. This as it turns out, is a huge challenge and presented technical difficulties to overcome.

Shooting video on set at night requires light. In fact the lighting set-up is so critical, it probably took as much time to create accurately then actually shooting the content.

What our eyes see at night is quite different to what the camera picks up and conveying the correct feeling and atmosphere of a night scene is pretty tricky. It required a moon lit feel with sufficient light on the model to maintain visibility without looking fake.

Is this impossible to shoot? No, but it did require 2 important aspects to the solution. The first is using light weight, battery powered controllable LED lights. These can be placed virtually anywhere with no trailing power leads and full dimmer control. The second part is having the expertise and knowledge of Hywel on set to arrange them in such a way to create the correct feel. It’s a daunting task and taking sufficient time to really get it set-up properly is vital. Once you have them roughly in the correct place and pointing in the right direction, there are a lot of fine tweaks to make including colour correction, diffusion, camera set-up and monitoring the output on a large screen to check the final look. But if you can achieve all of this, the results are very impressive.

I’m about to edit these night time sequences, so hopefully I can do justice to all the hard work Hywel put in.

Haunted

Earlier in the year, we arranged a week location video shoot and allowed ourselves some dedicated time to film a new movie called Haunted. Ariel scripted a wonderful storyline and directed the movie during the filming process. It was fantastic fun creating this in a style that was somewhat outside our normal realm.

It stars Ariel, Janey and Katy, all with very different individual characters who meet up for a holiday weekend together in a luxury house which, unbeknown to them, is haunted. We have no less then 7 separate bondage scenes, cool slo-mo footage and filming at night!

Editing is now underway! I'll post more details as it progresses...

Steve

Why does everything take longer? :)

Hi All,

It doesn't matter how many good intentions you have, everything takes longer (and costs more). I've not had time to progress with editing Slave Auction because I've been shooting and editing pics for Restrained Elegance for the last couple of weeks. And, I must admit, because I had a two week holiday for the first time in YEARS.

Gearing up to polish off August's RE updates, may get a chunk of September done as well if I can, then hope to clear my desk and get back to Slave Auction.

In the meantime, some really good news- Steve has just taken a copy of all the footage for Haunted and is going to start editing that. Hopefully we can get a new film released before too much longer!

Cheers, Hywel

P.S. at least the new version of Apple's editing software, Final Cut Pro X, has come out. This is a lot of fun to play with so I am really fired up to get down to some editing again as soon as possible!