My Favourite RGB Light For Filmmaking - ZHIYUN MOLUS X60

When I first started filmmaking and got into the lighting techniques at the time it was actually quite difficult to get coloured lights, the RGB lights because there were either those gels you have to put on, they were fiddly and often fall off and then we had those big RGB panel lights but they were heavy and not really portable but fast forward to today we have this this is the light that Zhiyuan sent me it's the X60 RGB light as you can see it's quite compact which is the first thing I already learned inside we have some charging cables and then here's the light let me just take the cover off look at this look how compact this is how small you can literally fit in your pocket and that has got millions colours you can produce and I have to give it to Zhiyuan for their innovation of making it so easy and portable whereas there's other RGB lights out there it's not powerful enough don't have the colour accuracy or it's just a bit too big what also comes with this is this detachable battery now there's two ways you can power this light you can either plug into the wall using this or to make it even more portable the X60 also comes with this little dome with a diffuser which you can attach to the light and what this does of course give you a softer look on the skin so it's not too harsh and you know what I just realized if you look at this this actually looks like a little portable camera like you press a button and you can take a picture pretty cool design and it's not too heavy so definitely is so portable you can use outside indoors anywhere with this battery grip attached you can run about 50 minutes if the brightness is 400% but obviously a more a few hours if it's dimmed at a lower brightness the X60 RGB light is part of the Zhiyuan Monos range in terms of the physical control on the light itself we have the power button and the two knobs here pressing one on the left take you through two different menu options and the right to adjust the brightness color etc but you can also press the right button which increases the value in segments and just think about all the situations where you can use this light and because it's so compact and small you can get into small spaces that you normally couldn't get into with these big panel lights but in this video I also want to talk about the color theory when we are lighting for a scene because that color has effect on the audience emotional and psychological side depending what color you put in the frame now to understand this I have to show you this color wheel this rainbow donut it's more than just arts and craft it's actually a map to navigate coloring your film so let's start with the basics primary colors we have red green and blue but the real film begins when you actually start playing with the complementary colors those are the ones directly opposite each other on the wheel like orange and teal which is a very popular example in Hollywood films like Mad Max this film screams orange and teal you don't even have to look for it it's right there in front of you and you can see it just pops and looks so nice and cinematic another one is bad boys it's not so obvious but if you look carefully normally the skin tone is a little bit orange with a blue kind of teal background and Transformers has orange teal all over the place again it pops so nicely with the skin tone with the background the blue kind of teal color so what I'm going to do is show you how I can light some scenes with this x60 light especially if you're in an environmental location that has white walls which is everywhere in my place white walls generally aren't very attractive in films if you watch the big Hollywood films you'll see that generally it's got nice green red orange anything but not white but with this RGB light you can actually make a boring white room that looks a lot better so we just have to wait until it's night time because at the moment it's only two o'clock in the afternoon in the meantime I'm gonna go make myself a cup of tea all right it's evening time I have the Maros G200 over there to light the whole room so you guys can see what I'm doing before I switch on the other lights now I have two x60s one is here it's a little bit naked I'll tell you why in a bit and we have the other one here which is got the diffuser on there now behind me as you can see is a white wall as I said earlier most places have white walls and it just doesn't look really attractive in filmmaking like right now I've got one light bouncing off the ceiling and behind me it's just white and then you need some color basically so this is the light that's going to add color onto the wall and this is the light is going to light my face and I talked about earlier using two different colors and on the color wheel what complement each other is teal and orange so I'm going to use this light to light the background which is teal and then this one a little bit orange and see how that looks and see if it's better than just this basically now I said earlier why this was naked it hasn't got anything on it's because I'm going to put an adapter on this adapter will go on there and which allows me to put on a bigger dome softbox so that I can isolate the lighting you'll see later which is important so that the light from this light doesn't spill everywhere onto the wall so it mixes with the teal so you'll see later let's put this on okay so because that's on there now I'm able to take this off so that this light is now flexible in terms of going up and down the name of this adapter by the way is the ZY mount which is available from Zhiyun as well all right I have the dome here as you can see it's got the egg crayon which will avoid the spilling of the light so let's put this on okay we'll just set that light over here for a minute and this light I've made it teal already so what I do is point that at the wall just to the side and as you can see behind me there's that teal background that used to be white now it's not completely teal because I've got the the house light on so let's turn that off and now I'm just in silhouette but look behind me how cool is that a white boring wall is now all teal and now I just need to turn the other light on to light my face so let's go ahead and do that so I'm just using my monitor to check how I look you see this side here it's slightly orange it's because that light is pointing at the wall now so we need to adjust the position and make sure that it only hits me but not the wall okay this isn't too bad but I feel like this light needs to be a little bit higher so it hits my face a bit more from the top rather than from directly from the side and there you go now it's a little bit higher it's hitting my face so for this scene to work I think the character needs to face the light a bit more so you can see the face lit and it pops more from the background of the teal and that ladies gentlemen is how you make a boring white wall looking great with just two RGB light all right for the next scene I'm going to sit down there and act if someone is you know feeling down sorrow it's a negative feeling so I want to create a nice blue feel light coming from above here shining down and I want to add some red as well behind those blinds to give that pop from the background to the character okay I've set this this kind of blue I might adjust it but I think this is kind of okay and by the way here's a good tip if you want to check light is okay with another person sitting in you put your fist there to pretend that it's another person's face I guess and then you can see how that hits your fist to kind of understand how you might hit somebody's face okay let's make this a lot higher here and if we just move it here and for me to sit down yeah that's that's not bad obviously all the other lights will be off okay I've got it in red and I've got the diffuser dome on there um brightness two percent uh 100 saturation for red okay this is the final result uh I adjusted a little bit with the saturation of the blue was too much I reduced it by about two percent I opened the blinds a little bit more so that the red was able to hit my face rather than just in the background I think that mixes the blue and the red together is quite nice and this gives you more kind of sorrow sad or kind of sci-fi feel to it you know and this is a very different mood to what we did earlier and that's the sort of things you can play with color like I said and this thing almost also could be like art house which has that extreme color of blue and red or could be a music video okay let's do the final scene by now I think you got the idea that one light is always lighting the background to separate me from the background and the other is acting as a key light to light my face so using the same principle I'm going to do one more which has that moody feel to it this time and I'm going to put this light outside here maybe magenta or pink kind of color to light the back of me and then I'll be a silhouette and as I coming through here the door frame you're going to see my face being lit orange kind of color by this light here I'm going to place it so that it hits me as I walk in and this time I'm also going to change costume so I'll be a little bit more in character okay slight change of plan the back light I've moved it into that room so you can see what's behind me that separates more rather than to my right and then also the color magenta purple as you can see right now it's not really working for me and I don't feel the color really match and this is what I mean about experimenting with different colors depending on the color wheel and sometimes it doesn't work so instead I think even though those are RGB lights I'm going to turn all of them into orange yellow the exact same color temperature of 3000 Kelvin both are going to be at one or two percent this one's going to just point reflecting back from the wall this one's just filling that room and you're seeing the bit that just gives it even more of more kind of match because they're the same color and it still give that contrasty and also the moody feel to it as well so those are just some ways how you can use an RGB color light to introduce emotions into your scenes by understanding the color wheel which I talked about earlier and adapting to the environment you're in and just be creative you know we're at a stage now we can get RGB light that's powerful and almost the size of a credit card where you can put in your pocket take it anywhere put in tight spaces so yeah I definitely would recommend getting one of these if you're just starting out and looking to do your RGB lighting because it's small portable and easy to use keep exploring keep filming till next time