Cinematic Lighting 101 | Recreating Daylight Interiors

Hey, what is going on guys? Ted here with the A-Team. Today we're going to be talking about how to recreate cinematic daylight instead of a studio setting. Let's do this. All righty guys, so this is Megan Stacey. She's an awesome feature film and commercial DP living in Los Angeles. And today we're going to talk about recreating daylight in studio scenarios. So Megan, why is this hard in the first place? In the natural world, you may have just the sun coming in a window, but in reality it's bouncing off of everything outside. So when you're trying to recreate that in the studio, you kind of have to take all that into account and try and recreate that same environment to get a natural look. The first thing I would think about is the quality of light and what situation you're dealing with. Hard sunlight coming through the window, skylight, overcast look, dawn, dusk. Once you pick that, you can kind of start to build your setup around that. So I would say the next thing you should think about is color, because a lot of people think that daylight is just strictly 5600. That's not entirely true. Skylight is really cool. Direct sunlight can be a little warmer. If it's low sun, it can be even warmer than that. If it's raining, that can be different. So the next thing I would say is window treatments. This is something I feel is super important. I like to talk to my production designers a lot about it. So are we putting sheers on the windows? Are we putting Venetian blinds on the windows? Are we just having completely bare windows? And that's a whole other consideration. You've got to think about what's outside of them. All those things are going to kind of affect the quality of light. The last thing I would say is just direction. So depending on the time of day that you're trying to recreate, if the sun is really low and coming through a window, if it's high noon coming straight down, or if it's maybe on the other side of the building and it's just skylight, those are all things you've got to think about. All right, let's do this. Let's go to set. Okay, so we are now on set going over our first lighting setup. So Megan, what are we going for here in terms of the shot? So for this one, we're kind of recreating a rainy day overcast kind of look, really cool windows with a warm practical inside. So for our first light, we set up a 300D bouncing into an UltraBounce and a Muslin. So an UltraBounce is a rag specifically made for bouncing, usually black on one side, white on the other. Muslin, you can shoot through it. You can bounce into it. It gives you a really soft quality of light. So we're trying to create a big source outside the window. Right on. So number one, quality of light. It's a rainy day. You're trying to create something that's soft. Yeah, exactly. And the bigger the source, the softer the light. All right. So I noticed that you also put some gels in front of your lights. Is there a reason you did that? Yeah. So I just wanted to cool it down a little bit, put like a half CTB in front of it, cool it down and give it that rainy day sort of look. So then our third tip was window treatments. Did we do anything here? Having the shears there helps break up the light coming in from outside the window, but it also creates some texture over the big white source outside the window. So it makes it look a little more natural. So one of the things that you mentioned was direction of the light. How did you use the direction of the light in this scene? So what we did was we took this 8x ultrabounce and then we strung the 8x muslin from the ultrabounce to the set and shot the 3rd degree sort of half up into it, half into the ultrabounce. So in this case, it's not enough just to bounce off something and have it go through the window because that's not what natural light looks like. You're going to hang something from the top. That way you have light bouncing from different angles. You want it to be really soft and pay attention to what color it is. So for the second light, we put up a 120D into a 8x8 piece of show card. We wanted to get the feeling of light coming through the curtains even though you couldn't entirely see it. So again, we're talking about soft light coming in through the windows to match that quality that we're talking about. In terms of color, did you do anything here? Yeah, we also put a little bit of blue gel on it and we also put a little bit of diffusion on it just to spread it out even a little bit more and keep that soft light going. In the wide shot, it was dimmed down quite a bit. In the close-up, because I knew we would have to see her face a little bit more and see her eyes, I dimmed it up maybe like 30% just to kind of get a little bit more wrapping around her face and a little bit more light in her eyes. In the first scene, she's sort of silhouetted. She's separated from the background because she's against the window and she's dark. So there's a lot of separation there. In the second one, you know, not as much. We need to connect with her. We need to see her eyes. So we put a little more light on her. So for our third light, I noticed there wasn't actually a studio light. We just threw a nice table lamp in there, practical, in the scene to give a little color contrast and to light her face when she turned it on. So for our fourth element, it turns out it wasn't a light at all. What did you put in there? No, we actually just put up an 8x solid to act as negative fill. So for people that don't know what negative fill is, it's basically blocking out light that you didn't intend to have in your scene in the first place. So in this case, you're actually darkening those shadows on her fill side. Yeah, like you were saying, like in the natural world, light's bouncing everywhere. Sometimes you just got to cut that out. And this is just a little bit of the footage that was shot. All right, so moving on to our second setup, what are we going for here? So for this one, we kind of have like a hard light, morning look. The first light that we set up was a 300D, shooting just hard in through that window back there. No blue gel on it or anything like that. And also, we shot the camera at about 7,000K to kind of make it feel pretty warm. Getting that kind of golden hour glow a little bit. Yeah, make it feel like a little sun. Yeah, for this one, I thought I kind of wanted to have it pretty hard, no diffusion on her face and use the Fresnel attachment on the front of it to make it like clean shadows and everything. For the light coming through the window, we kind of kept it at a 45 degree angle, kind of low, not shooting directly in, but not super toppy either. For our second light, we just set up another 300D, very similar to the first overcast setup. Just kind of give a soft glow to the window. And we push a little more light through it this time through an ultra balance, the muslin topper. And it's just to kind of just glow the window a little bit and have a little soft push coming through it. If you have kind of the hard light coming through one window, replicating the hard light of the sun. If you have a window on the opposite wall, obviously there's not two suns, there's not two sources of hard light coming in there. You can create a hard sun look with multiple lights. Usually it's better to do one big light, but you just kind of have to pay attention if you're going to do multiple units to just be aware of the direction you're kind of pushing stuff in. So for our third element of the scene, I saw you walked in that same rag from before. What was that? Yeah, so we put up the 8x solid again to act as negative fill. And sometimes when you're using hard light on set, it's even more important because it becomes really important to pay attention to what it's hitting because it's bouncing off of all that, creating other big soft sources, so you got to block that out. The fourth element is just pumping some haze into the room. When you use a hazer, it creates atmospheric perspective in the room, it lowers contrast, and you can see the geometry of hard lights. Awesome. So those are our four elements for making this scene. We're just going to check out a little bit of that footage right now. All righty guys, so there's your episode on recreating studio daylight. Megan, break it down one more time. Yeah, so tip number one would be quality. Is it soft light coming in the windows? Is it hard light? What kind of daylight are you trying to create? Number two would be color. So the skylight's going to be a little more blue, direct sun could be a little more warm, there's a lot of stuff in between. All stuff to think about. Number three, window treatments. So you could use Venetian blinds, sheers, bare window, and that's all going to affect the quality and shape of the light coming in. And then number four is just direction. So is it low sunlight coming in? Is it toffee skylight? That's something to consider. Awesome. So if you like this episode, make sure you find kmegstacey on Instagram, ask her some questions there, give her some love. If you've got any questions, leave them in the comments below, we're going to go through and answer those as well. And finally, think of one scene that is a studio recreated daylight scene that you like from a movie. Post that down below. We're going to pick the best comment and give out an Amaran NX, which is one of our new on-camera LEDs. Thank you so much for watching this episode. I am Ted from the A-Team and we will catch you guys next time.