Filming Romantic Scenes
By: Lewis Mcgregor
Tags: Lighting, Aputure, Filmmaking, Cinematography, Romantic

How We Did It.

With the basics covered, let’s look at how we put that into practice.

Romantic scenes set at night are a genre convention. After all, you can’t exactly have a candlelight dinner in the middle of the day. I mean, you could, but it wouldn’t feel right! As a result, you’re likely going to be filming a romantic scene at night. To avoid prolonged shooting through the night to the early hours of the morning, look to set up your initial lighting design in the day.

Of course, you won’t be able to see what the result will look like directly, but as soon as night draws in, you can flick the power switch on and quickly adjust and start shooting instead of having to set up late at night.

First, we set up our practical lights, including a mix of string lights and Christmas lights. The sparkle of light is a key generic convention for romantic scenes. Both metaphorically and visually, it isolates the romantic couple under the stars.

Thankfully due to the improvement of low-cost LED technology, you don’t need to pull out the old school Christmas bulbs to get this twinkle. Instead, you can pick up inexpensive LED string lights which are battery-powered, and when used in abundance with a shallow depth of field, it will create that beautiful romantic sparkle.

However, as seen in the video tutorial, one strip of the LED lights was of the wrong frequency and was causing flicker on the screen. Therefore, make sure you purchase the lights that are localized to your region. 60hz for NTSC and 50hz for PAL.

Additionally, string LED lights usually come in two flavors: cool or warm. Consequently, make sure you pick up the warm variation if you intend on using them for romantic scenes.

The second practical we’re going to place into the composition is a candle. However, we’re going to get a production designer to make sure the candle has burned relatively low. For what reason? Well, in the wide, it doesn’t necessarily matter that the candle isn’t producing enough light to illuminate our talent. However, when we push into a close-up, we’re going to want to see that candlelight flicker.

As the candle has burned low and will not be in the frame, we can remove the candle and replace it with an Aputure MC. With the MC, we can not only increase the illumination to give the talent more fill but program the light in one of its many customized settings to produce a candlelight flicker. As the audience has already seen the candle in the wide, they subconsciously tie that light on the face to a candle when we cut closer.

While this looks decent, it doesn’t look very lively. It looks as if the only lighting in this area is the string lights.

Another typical genre convention of romantic dinner scenes is to have the ambient fill from the restaurant, and other establishments, softly spill into the scene. You don’t want this light to overpower the practicals but to supplement them.

To do this, we had an Aputure LS 600d Pro light up the shop window on the left of the frame, and because it’s an incredibly bright light, this was set at 0.1% power and diffused through the sheers on the window. For the light on the right, we used the less intense Aputure LS 300dII and used a light dome to soften the light further. And each light was gelled with a full CTO gel to match the color temperature of the practicals.

If you’re filming in a location that doesn’t have a window behind your talent and find that the scene is falling a little dark, look to improvise by what is at the location. On our site, we were lucky enough to have wall sconces, and we were able to take out the bulbs, and replace them with B7c’s and adjust the color temp via the Sidus Link app.

This is the before;

And After;

How romantic!