I’m filming a short video for an independent study and ran into some issues with filming light from a speed light. I was tired of working entirely in post-production to slap muzzle flashes on guns and adding adjustment layers and solids to make a “realistic” looking light fall off from the flashes. It’s time consuming, and it doesn’t sell well to me. I know that real guns don’t emit much to no light at all, but audiences expect it as most Hollywood movies have created that illusion.
My issue is that I decided to tackle a more organic way of creating light from the flash by taping a speed light onto the barrel of the gun and using a remote to flash it at a steady pace. In photography, you are careful to set the shutter speed at 1/125 or slower so the flash is entirely caught before the shutter starts to come back down and cut some of the light off. However, I shot film at 24fps, with a shutter speed of 1/50, and the camera caught about 1/3 of the flashes, with half of them influencing literally half of the frame, without touching the other half. I was really thrown off and confused by it. If it’s at a slower shutter speed, technically the shutter should be up for longer than necessary, allowing all the light to be caught. Can somebody shed light on my mistake? I have another film session on the weekend, and am still wondering if I should go back to post-producing it or give it another shot with a different method (putting a large field of influence diffuser over the light head or something).
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