Cove Lighting Tutorial: Light Like Deakins

Hi everybody, my name is Brady Bissette and welcome back to The Classroom 2021 edition. Yes, that is right. It is another calendar year here at The Classroom right here. So welcome. It's so great to see your faces again this year. I'm really excited to see where everything goes. Honestly, we did so much and accomplished so much last year in 2020. So I'm just really excited to see where we go together and how all of us really flex that creative muscle that we've got in our head. And it leads me to one question before we dive into the actual tutorial for today. And that is, I've gotten a lot of previous requests to add on something new to the channel, something along the lines of show and tell. And really that's me looking at your projects and looking at your footage and lighting setups and all of that and talking about it, saying what I like about it, saying what might need some work on it, so on and so forth. So if you would like to add on show and tell to The Classroom, leave a comment down below, let me know your thoughts on that. But let's go ahead and dive in with our first lighting setup of 2021. I'm excited. Guess what it is. Can you guess? No. Oh, did I hear cove lighting? I did. Yes, that's right. So when it when it comes to lighting, we always want that super soft, super smooth roll off from the highlights into the shadows. And using a method called cove lighting is a great way to do it. So grab a partner, pick who you want to work with today and let's get started. The cove light is a lighting setup made famous by the incredible Roger Deakins. And ultimately what he does is just wrap a frame of fabric around the subject to get that smooth highlight to shadow roll off that we really talk about a lot here in The Classroom. And what he does is just make kind of a semi circle around his subjects using typically unbleached muslin. And this muslin is a fabric that you can get either on Amazon or your local Hobby Lobby or any stores like that. And it's a little bit warmer than white, hence the name unbleached material that casts a lot of really nice warm highlights. But for the sake of this tutorial, I'm just going to be using white bedsheets because that's something that almost everybody might have access to pretty immediately. And using a method like this cove light is a great way to get soft light without having to cast through so much diffusion to the point where you lose all of your output. So if you've got a weaker light, you're probably better off bouncing off of that rather than cutting through any kind of diffusion because at that point you're losing a lot more light. So especially for low output lights and stuff like that, a cove light is a great method. It's definitely one of my favorites. So first and foremost, before we get any lights into the scene here, I want to set my camera up for success. So I bring my camera exposure down to expose for what you can't control. So the practical lights in the background, anything that is existing that you can't change. And then for the practical light right next to Sarah on camera left, I used a dimmer that was actually attached to the light. I used a dimmer just to bring that exposure down so the light wasn't clipping. It wasn't way too hot and bright, and it wasn't spilling any light in places where I didn't want to. So now that's all set in order, it's time to bring in the first light. And the first light is actually a background kind of a fill light that I want to bring in just to emulate moonlight, which will give us some color contrast down the line that you'll see. But to do that, I took light panels Astra 6X. It's kind of a one by one panel, and I put that to 5600 Kelvin, the color temperature of that light, and put it through some diffusion just to soften that light up just as moonlight is naturally ambient and soft and kind of spread out and not as much of a hard light as is the sun. So now with that light in place, it really cools down the frame and makes it look like this kind of cool, dark moonlight look that we're going for. And it also spills just a little bit on Sarah's shoulder and her head and her hairline, just making a little bit of a rim light on camera right you see on her left shoulder. That's all there. The light set to 5600 Kelvin, but to really amp up that cool blueness, I want to adjust my camera's white balance down to right about 3000 is where I settled at just enough to keep that light, which is at 5600, keep that light cool, but not so low enough to the point where our practical lights and our warm household lights aren't going to be not warm and lose that warm characteristics that we're going for. Now that that light is in place, it's time to actually set up our frame for our cove light. And these steps are very important to get this soft, smooth lighting that we are going for. So taking note of that practical light that I mentioned before, right next to Sarah on camera left, that's going to be my motivation for all of this lighting for this really soft, warm ambient light that we're working with. So I'm going to set up the base of this frame on Sarah's far side, and then we're going to bend that around, as you see in the diagram, and bend that around onto the far side. And that's where the lights really going to roll off and wrap into. And for me personally, to make this frame, I just use an assortment of stands and arms and gaff tape. What's really important is just making that framework shape that we're going for, as you see in the diagram. And if you don't have stands, I mean, it takes a lot of stands to do a setup like this. So if you don't have that many stands, you can just as well use gaff tape or duct tape or whatever, and just tape it to the walls. As long as you have that kind of rounded off shape that we're going for, that's the important part. So you've got your cove frame in place, and you've got your fabric of choice in place, whether it's the white bed sheets or your unbleached muslin, whatever that is, you've got that there. It's time to bring in our first light, or I guess second light, but first of the cove. And for me personally, I wanted to use a LED panel instead of a single source light. And I chose that because they tend to have a little wider, softer output and spread of light, and we're going for a soft look. So using a single source light might be a little bit too spottish or not spread as much as I would like to. So that's my personal preference for that. I just like to make it a little bit softer when I can. And my light of choice was Light Panels Gemini 1x1. And that light is a really, really fun light to work with, super versatile. And I mean, it just looks really, really cool. So that's my first light that I set up and we're placing that on the far side of Sarah. And this is going to be the beginning of our wrapping light. And when placing lights for this cove light setup, I try to avoid having it kind of straight on from where it's going to bounce back from. I always try to have it pointing down. Did something just die? Did the light just flicker? Anyway, I'm losing it. I try to have my lights coming from either down and then bouncing back or shooting from up and then bouncing away because then you're not going to block your output as the light bounces off of that bounce coming back and you're going to get shadows. So I always try to have my lights either coming from some sort of angle so it doesn't just die off in your light in your stand when you're bouncing it back. And then to match up with this practical that we're working with, I put the color temperature to 2700 Kelvin, just enough to keep it warm enough as that household practical would. And I put the exposure or I guess the output for this light panel to be at 80 percent. And this is going to be the brightest light of your cove light setup that you're working with, because you remember you want to have this light taper off and kind of fall off as it wraps around the face, not wash out the entire face. And then looking at it right now, just with this one light in place, you can start to see that wrapping job coming around, but it's almost leaving more of an edge light on her profile. And you get a lot of shadows that you may not want creeping across the face and just kind of falling short right around their far side eye. And it just might not look as good, which of course calls for the second light really to bring things home. So the second light to our cove that we're going to be adding is the same thing, a light panels Gemini one by one. And I had that again to 2700 Kelvin, same as it was before. But the output to this light is going to be around 25 percent. It's a lot dimmer than our primary, than our first light. And the reason for that is because remember, we don't want that light to wash out and be bright all the way across the face. We really just want it to roll off and fade into darkness or fade into that shadow smoothly. So by having this light dimmer, you're going to introduce a lot of the shadows and contrast that you do want. And then this light you're going to see, it's kind of going to backtrack a little bit and add to that rim light on that side of her face. But then by directing this light more into your cove and further down into your cove, you're going to see the light kind of roll and bounce through that. And that's where you really see that soft roll off on her face. And we even see a little bit of that Rembrandt triangle that we were talking about a few videos back. That looks really, really nice. Now, depending on the scene and the look that you're going for, there's always the option to introduce a third light into your cove light set up. And that really all depends on how that light is initially wrapping into that far side of the face. And if there's too much, dial it back, dial the exposure back, or if there's not enough and you just can't get more output out of your lights, you can bring in a third one, just following that pattern of kind of brushing that back end of our cove light just to get a little bit more output, a little bit of fill on that shadow side, but not enough to completely wash everything out and make it flat and even. And then one more thing that I wanted to do just to polish everything off is put just a flag right back around the first or on the first light, just put a flag on the backside of that. So we weren't getting any backwards spill to wash out the moonlight and wash out the rest of the kitchen because I wanted to isolate any light that we're pushing into the cove and not bouncing backwards. So if you're getting any light spill or if you're getting anything like that, it can't hurt to just put up some black fabric or put up anything just to flag that off to make sure that it doesn't bounce in ways that you don't want it to. And then there you have it. That is a pretty simple cove light. So let's go ahead and look at the progression of everything that we added. The cove light, as you can see, is an excellent tool for getting really smooth and natural lighting. And it's a great tool to use when you've got either a larger scene or people moving around the scene or more people in the scene because simply just you've got a larger light source there. So there's more wiggle room for if people are moving around and a larger source to spread the light on the entire scene rather than having something like a softbox right here, lighting almost a tighter shot. You've got a large source of light that's really going to fill the entire scene. So it's a great tool for things like that as well. But simply for me, I just love this soft, smooth, natural light that it gives off. But that's really it for today. So again, I want to dive into 2021 strong with all of you guys doing a lot of creative, fun things and building this community that we have. And honestly, I could talk forever about it. I'm so excited. I'm excited to have you guys here. But let's all go pretend to be Roger Deakins for a day. Enjoy this cove light setup. I'll see you next week. And with that class is dismissed. See ya.