Creating Cinematic Ambience with Color Temperature Techniques

Dear diary, am I still blue or white? Actually, I was hoping for a different answer. Okay, I'll be white. I'm worried about tomorrow's meeting. He came home with a hoof. And they looked gorgeous together. Calm down. I think you shouldn't talk to me anymore. I mean, to you. You look... I'm not crazy. He doesn't need schizophrenia. We will explore three lighting setups as part of our cinematography lighting masterclass. I'll show you how to create stunning visuals using soft side lighting. You will see the book light technique with a lens light. I'll also demonstrate how to set the mood and contrast in a scene by using two different color temperatures. And finally, you will see how easy it is to disguise all artificial lights as natural light. Recently, my equipment collection was expanded with two very interesting fixtures from MOLUS B500. Zhiyun generously provided these lights, so I could test them in real production conditions. And we successfully used them for wide and medium shots. The lights have a power of 500 watts with an impressive output of 76,400 lux at a distance of 3 meters with a reflector, which is great for such a compact fixture. Additionally, the lights are designed without an external power supply, making them easier to grip. The color temperature range from 2700 to 6500 kelvins allows you to work with various temperatures, from simulating fire to cloudy skies. The setup used to shoot the intro includes an Arri Alexa and Lomo anamorphic lenses. To ensure this setup doesn't mislead you into thinking that the camera and lenses are the key elements of cinematic quality, I will include footage shot by students using Blackmagic Camera throughout the video. In the medium shots, I often try to leave the part of the face closest to the camera in shadow. The closest to the camera area is fairly easy to identify. If the actor is standing in a three-quarter view, you can mentally draw a line along the direction of the character's gaze. Typically, the camera and the dark exposure are on one side of this line, and the light source is on the other, whether it's a backlight or sidelight. We created a dark area behind the camera by blocking one of the windows, intentionally creating negative fill on the shooting side. In this case, the warm light on the face is supposed to enhance the light of the floor lamp in the background, and also subtly suggesting to the audience that there's another similar lamp off-camera. This is enough to motivate the light on the character, set to 2700 kelvins. In this scene, we used my favorite book light setup, with a light grid diffusion. The MOLUS B500 is quite harsh to light directly, even 1%, due to the small size of the LED lens. So we typically reflect such lights through foam board. A four-foot glowing surface helps achieve softer lighting, and additional fabric in the form of a light grid helps soften the light on the character. This kind of light can easily wash over the shadows on the character. And now we have a quite soft light. So I try to cut off excess diffused light with flags. We don't need extra light on the walls. For the background, the second MOLUS B500 is set to 100% power with a color temperature of 6500 kelvins. It casts a direct beam straight onto the floor. Haze helps reveal the light beam and create additional contrast. We lit this middle shot via three layers of exposure. Notice that the character has an area with deep shadows, mid-tones, just below the middle gray exposure value, and a bright zone with backlight reflecting about 18% of the light on her face. Why use such a lighting setup for the character? Simply for aesthetics. Sometimes, certain lighting techniques don't follow a specific logic regarding when exactly to implement them. However, it's important to consider the motivation for any light source. In this case, the backlight was created by an LED fixture to simulate additional light from the window. The side key light in this scene works like a skylight, but with slightly reduced intensity. We created this lighting setup using the book Light Technique and the MOLUS B500 fixture with a color temperature of 6500 kelvins. Any daytime interior lighting is always a battle against excess of the natural light. To make the image contrasty and dimensional, the bright side must differ from the dark side by several stops. If we recall the theory of contrast ratio, we need at least a 2 to 1 or 4 to 1 ratio for visible contrast. Achieving this ratio is easiest when there isn't much light in the scene initially. But if you're working in a brightly lit room, where the light meter reads about 8 f-stops, you need twice as much light to increase the exposure by one stop. This requires very powerful lights. A simpler option is to darken the room as much as possible, so you can add light in the amounts needed to create depth. This is what we do from shot to shot, blocking out excess windows and removing excess light from the frame by negative fill and blocking over light reflection. In this scene, one window behind the camera was covered via black fabric and the other two with white fabric. The window behind the camera helped create negative fill for part of the character's face, while the other two minimized the bright exposure from the daylight outside. By means of additional light sources, we also added backlighting to the character from an LED fixture on a Boom Jr. We made it to enhance the light from the far window and to separate the character from the background with a brighter exposure to make a contrast. As you might have guessed, we lit the face using a book light with the MOLUS fixture set to 4000 kelvins. The light didn't cross the eyeline, so the dark exposure on the character was preserved. I'm sure that these lighting setups will help you create awesome medium and close-up shots. And this scheme with book light is suitable for both art shoots and interviews. If you're thinking about investing in lighting fixtures, we're giving a 10% discount on the MOLUS B500. Link and coupon in the description. You can always explore more lighting setups and techniques in my paid lectures available on my website as part of my lighting and set design training.