Cinematography Lighting Setup

So I'm going to use a combination of the daylight coming through the window as well as some artificial lights. If you didn't have daylight, you would place the light to her right instead, but we're going to use daylight because it's just available. Let's look at settings. First, white balance. As I described before in another video, that 4500 is like a cloudy day-ish. If we boost it up, that's too bright, doesn't really match the daylight that's coming in. So about 4546 is good. And then you see the native ISO at the top is 400 and this is what we're going to stick on that. Otherwise, you'll create noise, like I said before. And everything else looks good, 24 frames per second, shutter speed 48. And if you look at the waveform on the bottom left, it looks pretty good. So it's well exposed. Always place a camera either directly in front of the object or character or to the darker side. What I'm going to do is, although this looks quite good, you can see the shadows on the right hand side. We're going to try to separate her from the background and her. To do that, it is lighting. You need that basic lighting just to create that depth from the wall and to her. So I'm going to add this light here. It's a panel light. I've put some egg crates and diffuser on so that it doesn't spill everywhere. I want it to kind of hit her hair a little bit. You can see that just on the rim of her hair, you can see the nice golden touch of the light. And this doesn't have to be on this side on the left. It can also work on the other side. It depends obviously on the story where the light is coming from. And if we look at before and after, you can see clearly this adding that light, it creates the depth, give it more character and just more three dimensional. In another setup, I point the camera right at the window and put the ND on to expose correctly for outside as you can see. But as a result, if you remember what I mentioned about ND, it's now everything very dark. So what you want to do is use a light to fill the room. So you can see her face. Unless of course you want this effect that's kind of again relating to what the story you want to tell. If it's something that she's suffering, if it's a dark kind of tone you want to go for, then don't use a light. But let's say for example, you do want to see the detail on her face, then we're going to put this light here and don't directly shine at her. It's like bounce back against the wall so that it's soft and nice just enough so we can see the details. If you've enjoyed learning from this video, I actually have a filmmaking masterclass where I teach from screenwriting to cinematography and all the way to post-production. So you can either tap the link in my bio or comment below with the word learn to get more information.