lighting BREAKDOWN - faux streetlight

It’s trickery, shenanigans, and tomfoolery time! Here’s a breakdown of how I created a faux streetlight effect for this sequence in the Overtures and Undertones music video.

During location scouting for the music video Overtures and Undertones – by which I mean tooling around Rainbow Beach like restless teenagers – we happened upon this location which we dubbed ‘The Triangle’. Not super imaginative considering that it was just three connected streets around a triangular median of grass and trees. I really liked it because of the difference in levels and directions, so I knew I could get a lot of dimension in my shots. Not only would people walking on the upper street be walking above the others, but away from or towards them as well.

While there were a few streetlights around, we wanted a more dramatic look and I needed more light in general. I chucked a LED panel as high as it would go on a stand, and assigned one of our ragtag crew to babysitting duties so that it wouldn’t topple over (I have since bought sandbags, I promise).

You can see above that there is plenty of light in the shot, but it still has lots of drama with those long shadows and our foreground characters in silhouette.

This technique meant that I could also use the light for a background edge.
The shot above gives the illusion that the light is attached to a pole, but in fact it’s just sitting next to a tree.
And in the frame above you can see the entire light, stand and all! You’d never clock it in the edit of course, but it’s fun to hide in plain sight.

Check out the entire music video below!
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