Cinematic Lighting 101 | How to Use Practical Lights!

What's up Aputure family? Today we're gonna talk about practical lighting and four different ways you can use them in your next movie. Alrighty guys, so we are on set with my friend David Weldon. David Weldon is an amazing DP that has shot with artists like Taylor Swift and Joseph Kahn. He's shot commercials for Ford, Audi, Nike. He's really done it all and I'm super excited because today we're gonna talk about four different ways you can use practical lighting to enhance your creative filmmaking. So the first way we're gonna do it, we're gonna do a visual interest kind of look. We're gonna do something that's in frame, then we're gonna do something that's motivated, and we're gonna do something with a shape. We're gonna create a shape out of the actual lighting. All right, so let's jump right into it. Now what was our first use of practical lighting? So the first use of practical lighting starts in the wide shot. We've got in the background of the wide, we've got the string lights coming across. So we're gonna kind of motivate from those in our coverage, which gets us into the second lighting setup, which is gonna be on Alex. It's his coverage. The idea behind that is we still wanna play those practical string lights, so we ended up bringing those down physically. We're gonna lower them into frame so we can see a couple of them, catch a little piece of it, and connect those two shots together. We then have to bring a little pizza box to catch some of that skipping into his face, and then we took an F7, and we wanted to key light him with that some more. Maybe more of an eye light, just kind of pop his face a little bit more. Awesome, so there's our first use of practical lighting to add a little bit of visual interest in the back frame. Let's go check out that setup. So David, talk to us about our second use of practical lighting. So the second use of practical lighting is the coverage that we're shooting on Maki at this point. So we're gonna start by looking to see what we see in the frame. I gotta get in the background with some Duvetyne. We did it with a couple of 4x floppies, and we're gonna put those back there so we can just let it fall into darkness. The second aspect of it is we're gonna have to bring her exposure up. We're gonna have to light her a little bit. We brought that little pizza box, taking some of the return from the backlight into a key now that's off the pizza box, and then just a pop of the eyes with the F7. That's the whole idea. Now we've got a little bit of the table lamp in the background. Let's slide it into frame. Let's make it interesting. Put it up against the wall, but dim it way down so it doesn't draw your eye away from her to that box. Let's go check out that lighting setup. Alrighty, so now we're on our third use of practical lighting. David, what was the setup? So this one is becoming motivating. The idea behind it is we're gonna motivate from the lights. So we've got two lamps that we put inside the house because our talent is now outside. They're having a little drink at the end of the night, and we want to motivate from those lamps. So the way we use the practical here is we took a 120D, put some CTO in front of it. I think it was a full CTO to warm it up, make it feel like a tungsten light. Mini light dome to soften it with diffusion inside, and a light grid to keep it focused so it doesn't spill on the back wall or light up too much. Then we brought it around to light up the half side of Alex's face. The idea behind that was just to make it so that when you get into the coverage, it gives you some context of what's going on inside the room and how it's playing coming outside while they're standing outside having a drink. Now, this is something I know that scares a lot of starting DPs. They want their wide and their close-ups to match, and you're saying that you brought in an entirely new light in your close-ups. Yeah, well, I think you have to think about of where the edit point is gonna come or how long are you on that wide shot? What is it telling you? What is it motivating you? So, there's our third use of practical lighting, motivating light. Let's see that recap. Alrighty, guys, so now we're on our fourth and final setup of practical lighting. David, what's the setup? So, in this one, we've got our dancer out in the front. We're gonna backlight her again. We're keeping it with a 120D Mark II, keeping it daylight, mini light dome, double-diffused, still with no grid. We're trying to just kinda let the light fly a little bit. I think we tilted it out just a touch so it wouldn't actually hit the back wall this time because our quasars are lighting up the back wall and keeping it so that there's some visual interest back there. So, outside of this lighting setup, what are the other times that you've seen people use this kind of practical lighting? So, you do a lot of music videos. You think of trying to find that voice of the artist, you know, of who they are, what they look like, and all those kinds of things. So, a lot of this stuff might play into that. Right on, and by taking off the grid, you're making that light spread very broad. Exactly. You're hitting both the talent and the background. Yeah, and there's a certain amount of balance we had to achieve as well where, you know, we're fighting some of the exposure of the quasars as well. Like, these are, you know, dimmed all the way down. They're still pretty bright even in this frame. Cool, let's check out some of that footage. Let's check out the recap. All right, so there you have it. There's your episode on practical lighting with David Weldon. Break it down one more time. So, we did a visual interest, string lights in the background. We do an in-frame where we can see the practical lights. They're playing, you know, on our talent. The third one is motivated. We can see it in the frame kind of as well, but we're gonna motivate and push from it with some artificial lighting. The fourth way is shapes. We're gonna make a shape out of it. We're gonna design it and it's gonna play in the actual production design of the piece. So, four different ways to use practical lights and four different ways to think about practical lights in your next film. If you liked this episode, make sure you find David on Instagram at davidcweldonjr. You can find his DP work there. If you liked this episode and you wanna see more content, find Aputure on Facebook, Instagram, The Works. If you want some Aputure gear, make sure you leave a comment below with the next episode that you want us to cover. Not only will we maybe cover that episode, but you're gonna win a Light Dome Mark II, which is one of our new accessories that just came out super recently. And of course, I'm Ted from The A-Team and we'll catch you guys next time.