 Welcome to The Crimson Engine. Today we are looking at the secret weapon of the cinematographer which really involves going to the location beforehand and lighting the scene, also known as the pre-light. So how do we shoot Neon Noir's 22 pages in just two days on a weekend? We had five locations to go to, each of which was about a 30-minute drive from one another, so we knew we were going to lose about 90 minutes just in travel time. Also we were shooting a lot of this for free so we couldn't ask people to show up at 6am, we had an 8 o'clock and a 9 o'clock call time. The secret for us to get through the days was what's called a pre-light, which means getting the location before you're going to shoot there, going there with the lights and the camera if possible, lighting the scene, experimenting with how it looks, getting it to 90% of what you want and then leaving, coming back the day you're going to shoot, turning the lights on and shooting. For us we did this on Sunday, it was our final setup, final scene of the day, it was the gangsters warehouse, the interrogation scene, I looked at a bunch of other interrogation scenes that I really liked like the one in Casino Royale, there's a couple in American Assassin that were cool, wanted to do something along those lines with the resources that I had. So the scene was six pages long, which is going to translate into about six minutes of screen time, it was just two people at a table but six pages is actually quite a lot of dialogue, six pages is longer than a lot of actual short films and we weren't going to get a chance to rehearse beforehand, so we're only going to have from about 2pm to about 6pm to shoot this scene. How I mitigated that rush was to get access to the space on the Thursday beforehand, go there with the lights or light it. Film Gear, which is a company here in Los Angeles, were kind enough to let us use their warehouse that was full of lights and were able to use their lights to light the scene, we didn't have to transport the lights there and take them away again, they were already in the warehouse. Me and an assistant about three and a half hours to set up the lights to get them all rigged, to get them looking the way that I wanted them to, the added advantage was that because we're shooting on the C200, which I own, I could bring it with me, I could shoot my assistant as a stand-in and then take that back to the studio, tweak the grade, look what I was getting in not just in camera but on the computer and then make adjustments for that when we went back to shoot on the Sunday. So all in all we saved three and a half hours at least of shooting because we didn't just need to light the scene, we needed to get up into the rafters of the warehouse and black out the sunlight coming in so that it wouldn't wash out the contrast I was going to create. So we got there at two, we still had to kind of like block and set up and do makeup and tweak the lights and set up the camera for about an hour. So we got there at two, we didn't, we shut from about three to about five, 36 o'clock I believe. Had we not done the pre-light we would have been there till nine, 10 o'clock at night, which wasn't really an option since FilmGear was letting us use their warehouse and paying for their employees to be there. I didn't want to ask that from them. So the key in the scene was a four bank fluorescent light that FilmGear makes that we suspended overhead of a table with two C-stand arms and a little bit of jerry-reaking. We had this all the way up, it is dimmable and we used the table itself as bounce. When we pushed in on some of the close-ups we then brought in a white card to add a little bit more bounce and a little bit more light to the eyes. Then we added a three quarter scratch with these lights behind both of the actors and we gelled them blue to create a color contrast with the daylight balanced key. The other lights we put in here were background lights, these were LED fresnels that are really really bright and we put them right down the end of the warehouse pointing them actually towards camera so that they illuminated the shelves and the stuff on the shelves and gave it this really great sense of depth and sense of space. When you're shooting a short film it can be very easy for the film to kind of take on a white wall syndrome where it looks like you're just shooting in the same small little confined spaces so to have this space that was really big and vast and came pre-dressed was a huge advantage and I think it added a lot to the scene, added a lot to the film. Thank you again to FilmGear for both the use of the space and the use of their lights. For the quality and the range they have they're very affordable. The link to FilmGear's lights and the other stuff we used on set is in the description. Neonua has come a long way. We have a fine cut now, just need to tweak a few more things before we lock picture and start on their mixing and the music. Hopefully fingers crossed we'll have something to show before Christmas. I'd like to hear from you guys whether or not you find pre-lights useful if you've used them. Often it's not an option because you only have the location or the equipment for the day of the shoot given what rental prices are. Thank you very much for watching. Subscribe if you want videos like this. I've started making blog posts that accompany my YouTube posts. You'll find the link in the description on CrimsonEngine.com. Thanks very much for watching and I will see you next time.