Lighting spaces. Not faces!

The difference between champions and amateurs is the same difference between good enough and perfection. It's easy to land on good enough, but perfection, in a way, depending on your definition, can be achieved. Complete falls somewhere between good enough and perfect. We will land somewhere in between the two here today, but my plan is to land closer to the complete slash perfect realm. I want to take you on that journey. I'm not going to be looking for a Rembrandt triangle. I'm not going to be following any rules. I'm not going to be trying to recreate any type of scene that I've seen before. The plan will be to have no light outside by the time that this is lit, but it is cool to see the light that's happening right now to influence maybe how this should be. Let's just say the script says guy in his garage is planning his next move. Also, I have 28 minutes on this memory card. I don't have any hard drives with me. I don't have any space on my computer and Dropbox Unlimited is no longer Dropbox Unlimited, which is a video for a whole other time. Let's see what we can do. I went to dinner and now I'm back. It's a big softbox right here. This is not how a room would be lit. It's bright in my eyes. It only works for this shot because it's right on the edge of the frame. I can look at this on everything and know that there's a big softbox right there. It's not right. I don't know if the frame is where I want it to be. This is where lighting spaces, not faces, comes into play. That phrase used to always bother me. I could only think about how the interior of a house is lit. Does it mean chandeliers up in the ceiling? It makes more sense when you approach it from, maybe not the phrase light spaces, but ask yourself, how would this room be lit in real life? How would it feel in real life? Or how would it feel for the feeling that you're going for? In almost no scenario would this be something that we would experience in life? You can kind of feel that when you're watching it on a screen. How would the lighting maybe be in here in one of two ways? One, in my brain of how I want things to look, or two, in real life. If you go the real life route, you then can tweak it to make it be heightened reality. If you go in your mind way, you can light it however you want. On to the first move, which the most significant part of it will be to not do this. Quick move of the key light to a twin bed sheet hung up on the window and the light bounced into it. Don't want to get too into this because we're far from done. Not even at good enough at the moment. Added some backlight. Key is way too bright. Closer, but I will take the key, which is bouncing off of the sheet, and put it outside so it's through the windows and diffused, pointing inwards instead of bouncing and like filling up the whole entire room. It should be quite similar, but I think it might give us what we want. The light is outside now, and we are somewhere in between daylight and nighttime. Also, one of the only reasons that I put the light outside instead of bouncing it off of the sheet to my right was because it was just too sourcey on this back wall, which could have been handled with a grid, but I don't have a grid, so I moved it outside. The source is a little bit smaller. It's coming through a window, then through a sheet. It's kind of coming through the other side of the sheet. It's probably too hot, but at least this gives me somewhat of an idea of maybe these lights will be outside like this, and we will augment what is happening in here so that it doesn't just totally look like there's a big light over there. If there were not windows right above me, you could still get this with a harder source high up and kind of just like pointed down, and if you wanted it softer, you could bounce like a Leeko off of the wall, or you could use some tubes, but since I have the windows, why not use them? And in the like original, if you want to call it a location scout, sun was coming through those windows and hitting the table just like this, and it looked good. All right, we're getting closer. This is one of the reasons why you might want to consider how would the room be lit because we were just able to fully move everything and not be totally screwed. Instead of being caught up with the lights being in the way, there's no lights in here currently. We have the benefit of having windows, but if you're on a set in a soundstage, you would be able to have whatever you want, or if you're in a house or whatever, you might have windows. I pulled everything off of the back wall, felt a little claustrophobic. Also, why would I be right up against the garage wall? It does look like a car could be parked behind me, and I'm sitting at a desk like on the wall of the garage. Even though I like how this is looking right now, I'm going to move the key light a little bit this way. I know I want hard light hitting this, which could maybe seem like a light in the garage. Even though I really like how this looks, I'm going to see what else we can do. What I saw was a bunch of shots that I set up after I saw something that was near perfect. For somebody talking to the camera like this, maybe this isn't perfect for an interview because you can't totally see me, but for somebody working on something in the garage, maybe it could work. Guy in his garage planning his next move. It's very easy to go too far. I had a frame on here that I thought looked really good, and it was just very simple, and it was when the room was just lit, kind of how it would be lit if there were lights outside or the outside. When I moved everything up, it didn't look as good, and it started looking more like an interview where this could be a variety of different things that are not an interview. In an interview, you're staring at somebody looking at the camera or looking a little bit off the camera. In a movie, you're seeing a shot for two or three seconds, or in a commercial, you're seeing a shot for two or three seconds. This would work. You don't notice the mistakes as much. It just needs to create a feeling that works in a moment and for an entire scene where things are moving around. There are no lights in the way of me working in this area or the camera moving around. Real quick, even though I don't know if this is quite as good as the one that was achieved by accident, I want to go through each light that's happening here. There is a light outside going through a twin mattress sheet. It's back behind me. It's hitting this wall right here, going through a window. There's another light just outside of the garage, above the frame here, so it's not hitting me. It is actually hitting the ground right here. There's a small little light right here hitting the table, and then there's an additional small little light hitting the wood right here. I will just show each of those going on and off. This is key light only. We can see what only the key light and the table light look like. This is the key light and the backlight. I kind of like this, but again, it all depends on the context. This is the key light and the table light because it kind of would make sense if I'm working on a table for the table to be lit a little bit, and all of the light is coming from over there, so you can see that it's kind of coming from that direction as well because it is, and it kind of fades off a little bit down here because it's barn door down, and it's barn doored so it doesn't hit me, and I put one other light on the wood over to my left to kind of extend the light coming from over there. This is somewhere between good enough and perfect. The tricky part about doing tests is it's hard to get to the perfect without there being any context or scene, but perfect in this scenario might be beyond just the shot itself, but rather that I have been out here for hours not really wanting to do this and multiple times almost just going inside, but accidentally seeing something that looked cool, moving away from that to try to do something that I thought might be right, but always having that frame that I kept hitting playback on and thinking, well, that looks the best, and then sucking it up and moving everything back and trying to match it over and over and over again, little tweaks, not getting it exactly, so you learn this looks good. Don't change it. You don't need to add a lot of lights. What looked good in that shot was two lights, and they were in the right spot, and it looked good, so you could just move forward with that. If something's looking good, you don't have to push it and add more lights. Be careful what you mess up on set. It would have been a problem if I moved forward with what I did do and tried to do something different if that was the look we were looking for. Tests like these, even though they're painful at times, especially doing them by yourself, takes absolutely forever, but you take what you learn with you and get good results. I at least have this couple hours of messing around with it, so it could be useful to do these types of tests or to watch these types of tests on YouTube, and I want to make more of these in different scenarios and share them here on YouTube for you. Posting videos on YouTube like this kind of pushed me to push it further, even though I'm tired and want to go to bed right now. I did mention set design. I originally was going to put some posters on the back wall, but that was when I was sitting closer to the back wall where it could have played as not a garage door, but now it is so clear that I'm in a garage that I decided not to put anything on it, and all of the stuff that I have on this table and some of the stuff back there is good enough for the test. So in reality, this would be more filled up. Maybe there would be some stuff over here, but again, all depends on the context. So I'm going to take two more shots, maybe a shot of me working on something here and a shot of my eyes and just see how it works in lighting the room rather than specifically tuning things for a shot of me right here where it's the perfect light on the side of my face, and then when you move anything a foot or more, it gets messed up. So I'll take a look at a couple other shots. We can see that there is like an imperfectness to the light here that is useful to have so that it doesn't just look like three-point interview lighting for everything or like perfect Rembrandt lighting for everything. It's like when you're seeing a shot for three seconds, it's like okay, and it feels more real if it just looks interesting, which doesn't mean that it needs to like follow any rule or anything or be like perfect. Things become perfect when there are some weird imperfections in them oftentimes. No lights have been moved. Getting the space down then puts you in a world where you can find good frames within what you have already created rather than having to find new frames and relight everything every time. There's times when you will need to adjust the lights when you move angles, of course, especially from wides to medium shots and tight shots, but right now there have been no changes in the lighting. I would consider gelling the light outside or playing with the color temperature a little bit, maybe having another one to kind of like glow out these windows a little bit more, but I think that this works and I think that I like this and it's a major improvement from where I started and it involves moving the camera, dealing with composition and lighting and set design and of course context, which we don't have at this very moment, but the tests will help you when you do have context to know exactly what to do. For example, if it's daytime, this would look more like daytime. If it was nighttime, it would look more like nighttime. Somehow this is like somewhere in between. Also, f1, if you don't have I don't know. I don't know what to say. I also want to be clear about one thing. You don't always need to light the space when you're in a studio or shooting fashion or beauty. You are quite literally lighting the face, so a softbox on a face can look really good and is useful for a lot of shoots, whether it's a softbox or a 6x6 or an 8x8 or a 12x12 where you are literally just tuning the face of somebody is a whole other video and in those cases you want to light faces, not spaces. So you will light the space a little bit depending on what you want in the background, but if you consider a like a white psych studio, you are primarily lighting the talent and not so much thinking about how would this look in real life. You are creating a whole different world, which is a whole different set of techniques. So it's not every single scenario that you need to consider lighting the space. Even in my final-ish frame, my face was barely lit at all. So when you look at movies, you don't always need to see the person. Sometimes it's silhouette, sometimes it's total natural light coming through a window. So it's not an always rule, it's just a sometimes rule. And you could see in the shots where I did more so light myself, kind of in a more traditional three-point lighting setup, that it didn't work and that the shot where I wasn't even lit at all, but there was light coming through the windows of the garage looked a lot better. Different situations call for different techniques and execution. Okay, peace.