I Recreated Hollywood Scenes with 2 CHEAP Lights!

Recreating shots from other films is a great way to practice things like composition and lighting. Besides that, you can really push the limits of what you're able to achieve with the minimal gear that you might have. In this video, I'm going to show you how I recreated these two shots from Hollywood films using only two small budget lights. For both these shots, I used the new Zhiyun CX100, which is a very compact 100W bi-color COB light with a built-in battery. My second light was the Zhiyun CM25, an affordable 25W bi-color LED panel that is pretty much the size of your phone. Step one when recreating shots like this is analyzing the image and figuring out what is actually happening with the lighting. Let's start with this shot from Inherent Vice, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and shot by Robert Elswith. Looking at this shot, I can tell there are two light sources here. One is the cooler toned key light, which is primarily lighting Joaquin Phoenix's face and also a bit on his shirt. This light is motivated by a window behind the couch, as we can see in this wide shot from the same scene. We can also notice that the light is very soft and it kind of wraps around the face a bit here. The wider shot also tells us that the very warm light hitting the hair is motivated by a household lamp and it's pretty much a hard source of light. Another thing that I'm seeing is that this light is casting this shadow on the couch here and adding a bit of warmth to the couch as well. Step two is getting the correct composition and it's important to get this right before setting up any lights. An important feature in the shot from Inherent Vice is the red couch. Our couch is blue, so I borrowed my girlfriend's red scarf to cover it up. And this is what the shot looks like with just the household lamps. Not very good. Let's start with adding in the main key light, which is the cooler light coming from the shadow and lighting the face. Since I don't have any space to set up a light on a stand or even use a bigger light, the Zhiyun CM25 actually came in very handy. I could simply set it up on the backrest of the couch just out of frame. I had it set to 6200 Kelvin to achieve this cooler blue colored light. In this shot, the CM25 is directed towards me with the diffusion rubber attached. As you can tell, the light is still a bit too hard for the look we're going for. Because of the limited amount of space in this setup, I wasn't able to add any more diffusion without it showing up in frame. But a great way of achieving softer light is by bouncing your light off another surface. So I turned around the CM25 towards the white wall behind the couch and that delivered the softness I needed. Next, let's add in the warm light that is casting this orange glow on the hair and on the side of the couch. For this, I placed the Zhiyun CX100 next to the couch. This light comes with a reflector and a rubber diffuser. But as you can see here, with the diffuser attached, the light is too soft and creates a much softer shadow than what we need. With only the reflector attached, we get a much harder shadow, similar to the one in the original shot. The CX100 was set to 2700 Kelvin to achieve a warm orange tone. The camera's white balance was set to 3500 Kelvin and this allowed me to get a cool blue tone from the CM25 key light and a warm orange tone from the CX100. Now we're getting very close to the original shot from Inherent Vice. But there were a few details which I wanted to fix. The first thing was the CX100 is spilling too much light on the pillows on the right of the frame. Now this was an easy fix with some black tape on the reflector to help direct the light. The second issue was that the walls in the room are white. So that warm light from the CX100 was bouncing back off the wall in front of me. This was conflicting with the cool light from the CM25. And to stop this, I placed some negative fill in front of the wall and that made things look a lot better. Another small detail is of course Joachim Fenix's blue shirt. And then I think I was able to get very close to the shot from Inherent Vice. Next let's recreate this shot from A Serious Man, directed by the Coen brothers and shot by Roger Deakins. There are a few similarities to the shot from Inherent Vice, but still the setup for this one was quite different. In this scene we're dealing with a practical, the ceiling light. And that is motivating the warm hard edge light on Michael Stuhlbarg's left side. It's on his face and also on his shoulder here. This hard edge light helps separate him from the background. The key light coming from his right side is a much cooler tone and also a much softer source. We can also see that it's not really wrapping around his face at all. The left side of his face is almost in complete shadow apart from that hard edge light. And one last thing is this deep shadow in the bottom left corner of the frame. Again I started with finding the correct composition and this proved to be a bit more complicated than in the first shot, with getting the correct angle upwards and framing in the ceiling light. Once I had the camera position locked in, it was time to bring in the key light. This time I was using the Zhiyun CX100 as a key light and because I needed a soft source I attached a reflector with a diffuser on top. I set this light to 6500 Kelvin to get a cool blue tone like in the original shot. After moving the light in a few different positions I placed it besides me and even a bit behind me. This way I was able to achieve this type of split lighting which we also see in the original shot. But I wasn't sure if the light was soft enough so I played around with the diffuser to soften the light even more. Now if you don't have a diffuser you can pretty much use any white material that lets through light, like a shower curtain or any other white fabric. Let's move on to the warm edge light motivated by the ceiling light. For this I used the CM25 LED panel and set it to 2700 Kelvin to achieve that orange color. This light is meant to be quite hard which can be achieved by removing the rubber diffusion. I tested a few different positions of the light and tried to find the one that would create a similar edge light like in the original still. It was all about finding the sweet spot where the light would be just out of frame but still close enough to create this hard edge. One thing I noticed was that the warm light from the CM25 was spilling on the ceiling and making everything look very warm and orange. So I grabbed some black wrap and taped it on top of the light to flag off some of that light spill. At this point I noticed that I wanted some more color contrast in camera so I changed the white balance of the camera to 3500 Kelvin. The trickiest part to get right with this shot was definitely the split lighting that really splits his face in half with quite a hard shadow line through the middle. I tried removing the diffuser in front of the key light because I felt it created too much of a wrap around my face. Then I set up some negative fill on the opposite side of the key light to bring more shadow to the left side of my face. But this actually created too much contrast. So I went back to the original setup with the diffuser in front of the key light. And if we just compare the shot with the extra diffusion and no negative fill to one without diffusion but with negative fill, I think you'll agree that the first one comes much closer to the original shot from A Serious Man. And as far as the dark corner in the bottom of the frame, I used a power window in DaVinci Resolve as I wasn't able to get that in camera. Now these shots are not perfect or completely identical to the originals but I am pretty happy with the results I was able to achieve, especially considering I was using a very limiting lighting setup with these two budget lights from Zhiyun. Besides that, the actual goal here was to practice lighting by recreating these shots. Anyway, I hope this video was able to teach you a thing or two or maybe even inspire you to try and recreate your own favorite movie shots. If you are interested in these affordable lights from Zhiyun, I will leave a link and a discount code for you down in the video description. Alright, that's it for me. As always, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!