Cinematic Lighting on a Budget: 3 Easy Setups

So here's the deal. I've always been kind of a jack-of-all-trades filmmaker, but my biggest weakness was always lighting. I just never felt like I had enough gear, enough time to set up great lighting setups on my own for my shoots without bringing on a DP. So when SmallRig sent me this RC120B light, I figured if I can take the very limited lighting and grip gear I already have and this one more powerful light and make some cool cinematic lighting setups, then surely my viewers can do even cooler stuff. So let's see if we can do some cinematic lighting on the cheap. There you go. Okay, so let's real quick see what we got inside this thing. The case is really nice, very securely packaged here as we can see. Here's the actual light. Wow, very heavy duty. Got a switch up here to release any fixtures you want to put on it, a reflector here, plug for the wall, and the power brick. All right, let's put it together. And I just threw the light up on my cheap AmazonBasics light stand, but it stayed up great. It's got this big knob making adjustments real easy, and the build quality is just amazing. SmallRig in general just makes really great value products. My entire camera is outfitted with their camera cage accessories, and this thing dims down to one percent. It's actually quite dim, which is very useful. And if we blast it all the way, we are at 100, and that is almost blindingly light. And this is the bi-color version as well, meaning I can go from a cool 6500K temperature all the way down to a very warm 2700K. The light also comes with nine really handy lighting effects presets, and you can change the frequency of the effect, the intensity of the light, and the color temperature for each of the effects, and it'll remember that for you next time you turn the light on. Here's me playing around with some of those. All right, so we're gonna try to shoot a window scene right here in front of this window. And what I've done is put a variable ND filter on the camera here. We're gonna stop down and expose for the window, and then try to get enough light inside here with the SmallRig to fill it out and not have me completely silhouetted. So here's how it would look exposing for the interior, but that window is obviously completely blown out. So we're gonna turn down our ISO, and we're going to turn our variable ND until we get a decent exposure outside the windows. Here's how a shot might look with no lighting. Now let's turn on the 120B. Blast the ceiling. Whoa. Now we've got the 120B aimed at the ceiling, filling it out enough so that I'm not silhouetted in front of that window. Now maybe we'll use this Practical here just to separate me a little bit. This is a Philips Hue light, so we can just turn it on and set the color temperature to be daylight. Now let's take one more look. And just this simple setup with the one SmallRig light and a little Practical light is already looking pretty decent, but I have a feeling if I'm able to reflect some sunlight from outside the window onto my face, that's going to be a very strong key light and make my face just pop in the frame much better. So let's give that a shot. Now like I said, I don't have a lot of grip or lighting gear, but what I do have is a mirror that's adjustable. So we're gonna put this right outside the window here and try to reflect direct sunlight onto my face as our key light. Now we just need to do some final adjustments here. All right, so now we have the issue that it's actually too bright, this key light. So we need to diffuse this mirror light somehow. I'm thinking if I put some foliage in front of it, it'll not only look more natural, but it will dim the light, cutting it significantly. I don't mind if there's some little hot patches on my face, but we don't want a big block of blinding light like this. So let's see what we can do. Let's just take some weeds here. Just blocking out the light like that. Okay, let's take a look now. All right, feeling pretty good about this lighting setup so far. I just think I need a rim light to bring out the back of my head, separated from this darker background. So I got this little Mo-Man LED light, battery-powered, and I'll be connecting it to this iPhone mount thing with like a flexible arm. There's my mirror reflector. Looking good. Practical. Got a arm mount rim light. Got the small rig lights bouncing off the ceiling. And the camera right there. Sun keeps moving, so I keep having to reframe the camera, but that is pretty good. Okay, final shot. Closer final shot. So now the question is, can I take a wide shot like this and make it look halfway decent with this light and whatever else I have? First off, we got too much open window here. So let's just use the curtains and cut that down a little bit and see what happens if maybe we point this up at the ceiling again. That does fill out the room. Kind of some high-key lighting, you know, a little bit more of a commercial style. But I think the problem is now that it feels like the lighting is coming more from here, and I want it to feel like the windows are motivating my key light. We need this key light coming from this side of me, and I want it to be soft. And we've already done the bouncing off the ceiling thing, so we're going to try something a little different. One of the easiest ways you can use this RC-120B light and get some really soft light, even without a soft box that you can buy separately, is to create this thing called a book light, which is what I'm doing here. I hung my reflector up on the curtain rod since I don't have a c-stand, and I'm bouncing the small rig light off of that, and then the bounce light is going through my shower curtain, which I've taped up here, and it's basically double softening the light. And this is called a book light, and it's a great way to get some really soft spread of light over your subject, even if you don't have a lot of gear or budget to work with. And now I'm getting this really soft key light being directed at the couch from the direction of the windows. Okay, and then I close that curtain some, shape that up a little bit, just to get rid of that overblown background through the window there. Now the book light's coming through, and it looks pretty natural to me. Not bad. Here's a comparison of with the book light, and then without. And you can see how much flatter and duller the image is with the 120B turned off. All right, so we did some daytime stuff. Now I want to try a nighttime setup and go for something that's a little more stylized. So let's see if I can pull it off right here in the office. All right, so I think first I'll just start with these cheapo desk lights. Don't really need either of them. They're not going to give me the best light for this, so I'm going to replace this one with my softbox LED panel. And boom, we got a softbox light. Pretty bright on my face. Might want to tone this down a little bit. One thing I don't like is that if we're going to be blowing moonlight through here, I probably want this to be cooler. So I wonder if I use one of these filters on this as well. That looks maybe too blue. That's crazy town. I don't know. We'll play with it. I'm going to move on to the small rig light outside. It's looking pretty good, but it's definitely blasting the entire office with bright white light. So we're going to try to channel that light into a more precise area. Since I don't really have the right tools to do that, I'm going to use my leftover roll of black wrap to make a little funnel around this and try to get more of a spotlight effect from this thing. So here we go. I just did a little grip tape to wrap this black wrap around this light and channel it into a more tight light pattern on the wall in there. Still a little too loose for me. It's filling out the entire room. But fortunately, we've got my blackout curtains that we can use as a flag to block out some of this light and get it to look a little nicer. So let's see what that does. That looks pretty good. We haven't put the blue filter on, so I'm going to put that out there and see where we're at. I think it'll stay. All right. It's looking cooler. I'm still thinking that this light is way too warm, so I'm going to use my other blue filter on this. So I did say lighting on a budget, right? I only have one more blue filter, so I had to put a purple over here to cover the rest of this softbox. But you know what? You can't really tell. So I'm going to make it as bright as I can. Now if we get a warm color, back here is my rim light, and that will kind of mimic what this light is doing. So we're going to fake that that is my rim light here. So we have the practical there, and then we have the on-camera light hooked up to the door and this flexible iPhone arm that's bi-color, fortunately. So I said it's the warmest color. Now what I'm just thinking is if I can break up this light that's on the back wall, it might look a little bit more realistic. So I ripped off a little shrub. I'm going to try to put this in front of the light to make it look like that moonlight is filtering through some foliage. I got the light here, and then I've literally just gaff taped this stick to the inside of the window. And you know what? It's doing a pretty good job. Okay, so I've brightened the small rig light to 75%, but I've also lowered the ISO on the camera to darken the image. The problem I'm running into trying to balance all these lights is that this key light right here with the softbox on is so weak. Even though it's three feet away from my face, it's barely getting enough light on my face to expose me properly as a key light. So I think I'm going to have to take the softbox off this thing, which means the light's not going to be quite as flattering, but it might give me enough brightness to work as a stronger key light. All right, this is with the softbox off, and now I think we're actually starting to get somewhere. A few more things, and I think we'll be good to go. So without the softbox, this light is a little harsh. So I'm going to throw a little strip of just plain old wax paper in front of it, and I think that'll soften it without cutting too much light. Okay, I've made a few more little tweaks, and I'm feeling pretty good about it, so now it's time to hit them with the fog. All right, as you can see, I've gone absolutely crazy with fog in here, but that's giving us a much softer, more diffuse light. This is going to be our final lighting setup, and I think it actually looks pretty cool. Looks like it's straight out of a sci-fi film. The robots are self-aware. Indeed. The love robots. Do they know? So we're doing a couple things here, mixed color temperature, so you've got the warm and the cool. I think the foliage is helping a little bit on the wall. It's breaking up this SmallRig's light right here, and as you can see, I don't have any gear for this SmallRig light, so the fact that I'm able to just take some junk I have lying around at home and create some cool lighting setups like this, not bad. So if you're a beginner, I really do highly recommend a light like this RC-120B. It's only $260 or so, and you're going to get enough power that you're going to have a lot of options to create some cool lighting setups. And if you want to save some money, they have the RC-120D, which is the daylight version. So that version just doesn't have color temperature variations. You just get daylight color temperature, but that's fine because you can get some filters and create whatever color temperature you want out of that light. So very impressed with this light. I wished I had had it for my short film Last Laugh Inc., which is on this channel. I was very worried about the lighting in that film, and I figured I wouldn't have enough power with these cheapo LED panel lights that I had, and I was right. But if I had bought this light like I should have, I would have had a much easier time lighting that film just with some very simple lighting setups. So check the link in the description. Get one yourself if you're so inclined, and I'll see you all next week with some more filmmaking tips to improve your storytelling. Thanks for watching.