Cinematic Lighting 101 | How to Light Faces

Welcome to 4 Minute Film School. I'm so glad that you're joining us today. My name is Valentina Vee and today we are going to be talking about how to shape a face with light. What are the different techniques? How do we do it? Let's find out. So today I have here cinematographer William Helmuth and he's worked with a lot of cool brands, Honda, Acura, Listerine, Nerf. And today we're going to be talking about how to use light to shape a face. First thing I think about when I'm lighting a face, lighting an actor or talent is the environment. How do I need to light this environment? What does the story call for, especially in a narrative setting? What do I want to say with this light? Where does my light need to go and how can I make this person look good? Where are the shadows falling on the face? How is the light affecting different features of the face? And then after that, it's just all of the little details that make it look good or bad. All right, let's take a look at the first setup. So the first setup is a far side key where you're placing your key light on the side of the person's face that is away from the camera. So would you say that for you, a far side key is the most common way to light a face? Absolutely. I'd say about 70 to 80% of the time I'm lighting a face, I'm using a far side key. It's just the easiest way to create visual interest with that shadow side facing the camera. It kind of draws me in. It makes me want to see more. He shoots a lot of dramas and I shoot a lot of beauty. So for me, it's totally different, right? I want the key to be like in the front, the softest possible, and you like it to be in the back because it creates a little bit more intrigue, a little bit more drama in the shot. So how did you set up this particular shot? We decided to go with a harder light. Our talent was sitting next to a window and I thought, well, let's simulate sunlight, like maybe it's late afternoon. So I had a 300D with CTS in front of it and then some Opal. CTS is draw gel. It gives kind of like a yellow orange feel to the light. Opal is a very, very thin diffusion. It just takes like a little bit of edge off of your light. So you can still get that like really harsh light, but it's just gonna like fall a little bit more evenly on your subject's skin and just look just a bit better. So I use Opal a lot. So after I got my key light in place, I got a 120D with CTS in front of it and more Opal in front of that as a backlight, some warm lamp light that was indoors. In the background, there's this brick wall that was just completely dark without any light on it. So I got from Mark, grabbed another 120D with CTO on it, which is a nice tungsten gel and splashed that on the brick wall. I really like how you're mixing the color temperatures actually, that you have like this warm light in the background and this cool light coming through the window. It creates a little bit more visual intrigue. Mixing color temps is probably my favorite way to create contrast and kind of make that foreground pop from the background and sometimes a pretty subtle way. Let's take a look. So for this setup, you actually did three shots. You had a master shot and you did two over the shoulders. What was your motivation for approaching this lighting? Well, one of the things that sometimes as like a newer DP you're told not to do is a near side key. That means the key light coming from the same side as the camera. Another thing you're told not to do is like a bottom light because it's not flattering or maybe it looks scary or something like that. But sometimes you'll read scripts or see a location where you'd need that coming from the bottom. And so what I decided with this scene was I wanted to illustrate how you can make a bottom key that's also near side at the same time, look flattering and look good. It doesn't have to be this scary light. So this is motivated by a practical that's like literally a lamp standing on the ground and you want to kind of make it look like all the other lighting is emanating from this one practical light. The thought I had behind this was like a secret moment between these two people. So I set up the lamp on the ground, just a bare bulb, hooked it up to a dimmer. We dimmed it down so that we weren't blowing out the entire lamp. And then from there we set up a book light with a 120D bouncing off of some foam core. We had both CTS and CTO between the 120D and the foam core. And then that was bouncing off the foam core and then pushing through a half grid 8x8 cloth. So all of those gels are really to match the color temperature of the practical and make it look like that light is emanating from the bulb. And also I like how you match the shadow so you can see the shadows of the furniture of our actors on the background and they're sort of going up and it helps sell the illusion that the light is emanating from the practical. Yeah, to do that we just put our foam core directly on the ground just at like a little bit of an angle and our 120D was pointed down at that so that light was just coming from beneath and that's really all you need for this type of thing. And with that soft book light it helped the shadows from being too distracting. We flagged off light on the sides and the background for both the wide shot and the close-ups. And then for the close-ups, the key for these, especially with our female talent, was making sure that our key light wasn't too close. Once you start getting too close with a bottom side key, you start getting like weird eyelash shadows, weird nose shadows. That's when it starts to look like a horror film. But if you back it off just a bit and make sure that that angle isn't like too extreme, it actually like fills in shadows beneath the chin and eyes like really well. I think it's actually very flattering. And then for our male talent, I went a little less frontal with the key light, a little more angular. Again, to play off the angles of his face a little bit more. Let's take a look. So our last lighting setup for shaping the face was in this sort of like gritty, like elevator shaft top lighting, really hollowing out the cheekbones. How did you accomplish that? I put a 300D with a spotlight attachment kind of high up in the shaft, just pointing straight down to simulate skylight or something just letting sunlight just straight through, nice and harsh hitting our subject. I basically treat that as my key light. Like you said, it kind of hollows out the cheekbones without any kind of modifiers. It just makes his face look like a skull. That's a little too harsh if that's the only light. So what did you do to fill it in? We put a 120D pushing through some half grid just in front of him to camera left to fill in the shadows a little bit and for his eyes to catch that light. It is not really even supposed to read as a light. It's just really soft, just filling in shadows. You're not supposed to even know it's there. And then I put some foam core on the ground, rested it against an apple box, just to bounce a little bit more light just back up into those shadows. You still get that shape. You still get the shadows, but it's not really a menacing feeling. Now it's just shape. So you can also switch it up though. You can take off the diffusion from the front light or you can add diffusion to the top light. That's right. Yeah. We did a couple things just to play around. We took the half grid off of the front light and that created kind of like this fun spotlight to feel like maybe someone in front of him was like shining a light on him. And then for our second alternate setup, I just put some unbleached muslin in front of our 300D top light. And I think that's a really interesting change because without doing anything else, it just spread that light all over the elevator shaft. And this is why I kind of love top light because you can make it really sourcey and really obvious that there is a light or if you really just wanted to feel like there's like the sourceless ambient light is kind of filling a room, a nice, really soft top light is the way to do it. I like the different options that you get with the same lights and different modifiers because it really goes to show you don't need a ton of lights. So let's take a look. So there's your episode on how to light faces. Now of course there's more than one way to light a face. There's more than even three ways to light a face. Absolutely. I would say besides the two points we talked about, letting your environment inform your key light, paying attention to the shadows on the face, I would also say trust your motivation. Trust the script and the story and what that's telling you the key light needs to be. It might be something that you think might not be a good key light, but you never know until you try that. Sometimes the most powerful ways I've lit a face are ways that I wouldn't have expected. I was trusting that source material. Speaking of unexpected ways to light a face, we want to know in the comments, what is a cool way to light a face, like a different way to light a face? Not one that we've shown, but be inventive. Talk about it. The best answer in the comments wins an Aputure MW light. If you like this show, if you like Aputure, please go ahead and subscribe, like, ring the bell, do all those things. Go into our social media. We have an awesome Instagram account. Follow William on Instagram. Follow me on Twitter and have a good rest of your day.