Cinema Lighting 101- Everything You Need to Know by Max Paterson - Valley Films x Wedio

Lighting is so, so crucial. If you're learning cinematography, I would suggest learning lighting almost before you learn how to operate your camera. Fundamentally, if you're working with beautiful light, you can almost get away with some poor operation and the scene will still work really well. If you're working with poorly crafted light, even if your operation is at a very high level, you'll probably still come out with a relatively bad result. Kia ora, welcome to this Video Academy course. My name's Max Patterson. I'm really excited to be sharing with you cinematic lighting, how to craft light to tell a better story with your image. We're going to crack into the theory of lighting now. The first place to get started with that is your fixtures and modifiers. A fixture is basically just the name for where the light is emitting from. So a bulb is a fixture. I've got a lovely FS200 light over here and that is the light fixture itself. I've also got two practicals behind me which we're going to dive into in a second. Those are also considered fixtures. There's a whole lot of different fixtures. I want to quickly dive into them. Even though today in a low-budget indie world, we're primarily dealing with LEDs. We've come through tungsten lights and HMIs and fluorescents and they have all held a really important place. They still do today, but they're primarily found in a higher-budget environment. LEDs have the most flexibility and versatility out of any light fixture available, pretty much. But they do lack out on some key features from some of these older light sources. So looking at tungstens first, they're a really great light that have been around for a very long time. I was even using them a couple weeks ago on a shoot. We had these really large tungsten fixtures. Beautiful, beautiful light that's very warm straight out of the gun without too much modification. You'll find them on a lot of traditional film sets. They can exist in quite a small form as little redheads or you can go up to much larger fixtures. Big, big issue with tungstens is they have a very high draw on power. So sometimes your household circuit won't be enough to power a tungsten. You might need a much larger power draw. The other issue is they can actually get really hot. If you've ever seen Sparks or Gaffers walking around on traditional sets or even still today, you'll see them carrying gloves. One of the reasons they carry gloves among many other things is the lights get really, really hot and it's not safe to touch. So dealing with tungsten lights is still actually quite fun to work with. A lot of DPs choose to work with tungsten because of the sort of slightly more old school feel to them, that they have a really nice quality which just isn't fully matched by LEDs. But they do have their drawbacks as well. Next up we've got HMIs. This light does still exist around a lot today and primarily because of its high output. You can get a really, really high output out of an HMI which we're starting to match now with LEDs but we're not quite at that point yet. There is still a lot of drawbacks with HMIs. You can only dim them down to about 50% and even as you dim them it can change the colour temperature a little bit. Striking them can take a very long time so to actually get the light to emit a source can take quite a long warm up time. Again they have a very high power draw. So there's a few disadvantages there. The big place for HMIs, they have a much cooler colour temperature so they're much closer to daylight than tungstens. Tungstens are much, much warmer. But the place for them today is primarily as a high output fixture. Next up we've got fluorescent lights. You'll find these primarily as tubes. I've got some domestic ones over top of me. The problem with using domestic fluorescent lights is they can have quite a low colour rendition so they can look quite poor on a human face. They'll give either a green or magenta shift and they can sometimes have a flicker that unless you get your settings particularly correct in camera it can create an on-camera flicker. High quality film fluorescent lights are great though. They are a bit fragile but you can create a beautiful image. Finally we've got everyone's favourite LEDs. This is the greatest invention we've had since sliced bread. The biggest letdown of LEDs is the cost. The cost per output is still relatively high. This is coming down year after year but at the moment if you want the brightest light per money LEDs still isn't quite your best option. But you do have so many perks for that one main disadvantage. You can control it over Wi-Fi. A lot of the time you can control on an app or a remote. You can dim down to 10% without affecting the colour. They are very portable. They can run off battery. They can run off domestic outputs. You can just plug them into the wall and there's so much flexibility and versatility that comes through with LEDs. They can exist as a chip-on-board light or as a tube. You can really morph them into whatever you want. And that draws us nicely on to our face types. I want to briefly mention the four main face types you will find on most lights which is a chip-on-board, a panel, a tube and the light which has a built-in Fresnel into it or Fresnel light. So a chip-on-board is the primary type of light you'll find in an LED. This is sort of a cluster or one main LED diode which is inside of the light itself. Then we've got the panels which is typically created of a whole bunch of individual LEDs which go through one layer or a couple layers of diffusion which create one big light source. This is changing a little bit here and there but if you look at most of the old-school panels if you remove the first layer of diffusion you'll find a whole bunch of individual LEDs. When they create a bi-color which is a light which can do cool and warm or a RGB light which you have the full range of color typically this is made up of individual lights which can each contribute their color so together they can choose when it's really warm it will choose all the LEDs which are warmer and when it's cool it will choose all the LEDs which are cooler. Then we have tubes like these lights behind me. They're really great. Again they go through some sort of layer of diffusion which sort of blends them all into one light source. And then Fresnels. Fresnels are basically a lens which goes in front of your light source so some Fresnels are built directly into the fixture itself. You'll find this commonly on a lot of tungsten lights. Majority of tungsten lights sort of have a Fresnel as part of the light fixture itself. Next up we've got modifiers so basically anything you put in front of your light fixture. So this does exist as a Fresnel. You've also got things like soft boxes you've got barn doors and honeycombs. There's a whole bunch of different modifiers that are out there at the moment. Aputure makes a wonderful selection of modifiers for their LED lights so does Nanlite. So of course we just mentioned a Fresnel. The main purpose of a Fresnel is to focus the light. So you can use it just the same as you might use say a zoom lens on a camera. You can focus your light to be a very specific point, a spot or you can open the beam up to be a much, much larger point of light. This also allows for Gobos which is basically a cookie cutter which goes in between the fixture and the Fresnel itself. And you can create some really great patterns with lights if you want to emulate for example a Phoenician blind you can put a Phoenician blind Gobo in your Fresnel or if you want to create sort of the image of tree leaves you can stick that Gobo in there as well. So that's really helpful. Soft boxes which is every YouTuber's favourite sort of one and done lighting technique. It's very, very simple. I'm actually using one now so I don't think I can dish on them too much. I think they do get overused however. But yeah, really great simple modifier which attaches directly onto your light fixture. It's this dome which has sort of a silver inside and then a white layer of diffusion at the front. What it does nicely is it controls the spill so it doesn't spill too much. The light doesn't spread too much across from where you're pointing but it also adds a lovely layer of diffusion there. Of course if you want to do this very affordably you could actually just bring up a layer of diffusion like a sheet or a shower curtain. Now the disadvantage of doing that versus using a soft box is your light's going to spill everywhere. So you would require using either Fresnel or barn doors or black wrap to help control your spill a little bit. So the next up is barn doors which is your iconic black doors on the side of your light fixture. They help craft which direction the light is going. You can cut light to stop it from spilling in places that you don't want it to spill into. Very helpful tool. This will exist again in a lot of old school lights. They're less common now but they can be separately attachable which is really useful. And of course we do have kind of what is almost in the same family as barn doors which is just a dish which attaches to your light fixture which helps sort of control that spill again and it helps focus in the light a little bit more. And then we've got honeycombs or air crates which is basically a net shape which attaches to your soft box. You can hang it up separately. Helps control your spill and make sure that you can maintain the quality of light that you have whilst also being careful of where the light is landing. A few other tools to quickly mention. We've got gels which help recolor the light you have. This just goes in front of the fixture. If you have a light which can only output one color temperature or one color this can help sort of bring it back to where you need it to be. My key light right here outputs 5600 Kelvin which is daylight or approximately daylight. I might potentially want to light a moonlight scene and want it to feel a little bit cooler. I could throw in perhaps a quarter CTB or half CTB depending on what my camera Kelvin is set at and help sort of cool down the light a little bit. So you've got your orange and blue gels which help can change the color temperature. You do also have specialty colored gels if you want to create, maybe you've got a a very moody, very stylized scene that you want to have a red light in you could put a red gel in and change the color of your light there. You've got C47s which basically attach your gels to barn doors or to the fixture itself. Just basically a closed peg which you can clip on. You've got scrims which help bring down the level of light. These are really commonly found for a lot of these old school lights especially ones that aren't dimmable. So your HMIs aren't dimmable, you might put in a scrim to help reduce the quantity of light coming out. They don't really exist in the LED world however. The all important diffusion, bounce and negative fill. This is a really, really critical one. If nothing else, I think learning how to really craft with light with diffusion, bounce and negative fill would be a really, really helpful skill. You can use the sun on its own to craft a really great image if you use these three main tools. First up, diffusion is basically something that goes in between your light source and your subject. So you've got different thicknesses of diffusion. You've also got different colors like bleached or unbleached muslin. A really cost effective option if you're looking to create a great layer of diffusion is shower curtains. You'll even find this on high budget films. They'll still use a shower curtain type material. It's a really nice sort of frosted layer which will help knock back the hardness of your light whilst also not impacting too much on the overall output. Then we've got bounce. Bounce light is a really, really great way to soften your light. So there's a few different ways of bouncing. You can set up a bounce board, a bounce card. You could even set up a sheet if you want to. That's another really cost effective way of bouncing light is actually just grabbing a big bed sheet. Or you could, if you're in a space with white walls, you might potentially decide to use one of the walls as a bounce. These two tools together can create a really great technique called a book light which I'm sure you've heard before which is simply pointing your fixture into the bounce which then goes through the diffusion before hitting your subject. A really, really great way to create incredibly soft light. Finally you've got negative fill. Negative fill is basically some sort of black material which helps cut light. So we have got cutters which is a black material. It can be black wood or it can be a black material which goes on a metal frame. This helps cut the light from spilling on specific areas. You might want to put this if part of your scene needs to make sure that there is shade there and the light doesn't spill all the way over. You could bring in a cutter. But then we also can use negative fill quite creatively to create a bit of shape and shadow. I'll often find if I'm working in an environment where there is a lot of white walls that I'll need a lot of negative fill. The main reason for this is as soon as you bring up all that much of a level, much of a light level it sometimes bounces all around the room and you can create a very high key flat look and this may not be appropriate for the scene that you're shooting. A great way of bringing back in that contrast, bringing back in that dimension to a face is by setting up negative fill. So you've got of course floppies which are those 4x4 frames which sort of open up to create sort of a 4x8 and you can bring that in really nice and close to your subject to create a lot of shade. You can do this with anything though. If you've got a big blackout curtain, sound blankets like black sound blankets work, it doesn't really matter. As long as it's black and it's big, you can cut light with it. Keep in mind of if your light is bouncing in the first place you can't create shade out of nothing. If I am outside and light is not bouncing from anywhere and I put a small black card in front of something I'm probably not going to get too much shade. Whereas if I'm in a room with a lot of white walls and I can see it's clearly bouncing off this wall I can actually cut a lot with that. You can create a little bit of shade in an outdoor environment but be mindful of where you're positioned because you'll probably need to bring in a massive amount of negative fill to create much of a difference. If you just have a very small amount it may not get your desired effect. Now these three tools are so invaluable. There's so many different things that you can do with them. Diffusion, bounce and negative fill and we're going to dive into that later. I just want to quickly say if you are starting out and you're wanting a cost effective way of getting all of these three there is the perfect tool for you which is a 5-in-1 reflector. It's cheap as chips and it is worth its weight in gold. They do break easily. I do go through them all the time but they're a great option if you want to keep things small and light. You can get very large ones sometimes but basically they have an inside layer which is diffusion. They have an outside which is white and outside which is black. They also have a silver and gold if you want a harder light which you can bounce back. That is an option for you but super, super useful tool. Use it all the time. So we have high key lighting which is effectively a low contrast type of lighting. It's a very low lighting ratio like a 1 to 1 or a 2 to 1. As mentioned you would find this commonly in say a comedy or a sitcom. A lot of sort of old school television has very high key lighting. They just have an abundance of light without too much dimensional shape to it. It's very easy to create. Choosing the right reasons for lighting with high key lighting is important. You might choose potentially some of your exteriors to have a high key feel to them where there's not too much contrast going on. Or tonally in your film. If you want things to feel a little bit lighter you might choose to go for this low contrast look. And then perhaps move some of the more dramatic scenes to be a little bit of a higher contrast look. It does affect the way that we interpret image. It generally is fairly invisible. It's very similar to what we experience most of life as. Most of life, talking and walking around we're actually seeing people having a pretty even lighting ratio. So it does have a pretty natural feel to it. Generally speaking though, most people would consider high key lighting to be not particularly cinematic. It doesn't have a very film look to it naturally. It has more of a television feel primarily. The opposite of high key lighting is low key lighting. Some people refer to this as upstage lighting which comes from the term when there was stage performance of course your typical lights were mounted in front sort of almost overhead the audience. Sometimes you'd have lights on the opposite end, up the stage. Of course old stages actually had a slope so it was physically going up. Low key lighting is primarily this higher lighting ratio like a 4 to 1, 8 to 1 or higher. Really great technique is to use this upstage lighting technique which is moving your light source to one side of your subject. So let's say that I am doing a dialogue scene with someone in front of me here. If I were to move the camera over to this side of me you would find the shadow side of my face is facing the camera. The light source is actually coming from behind or slightly off to one side but primarily behind the subject rather than in front of it. This would be considered an upstage lighting move. It's really nice. It's a beautifully cinematic feel straight out of the bat. I challenge you to watch any film that has a bit of contrast to it. You'll find this used all of the time as the light source being pushed off to the upstage side of things. Low key lighting is creating a much higher contrast look between your fill and your key. Great technique with this is by upstaging your lighting. We've got the all important backlight. Backlight comes in many different forms. You've got your kickers, hair lights, edge lights and rim lights. A lot of these are kind of in the same family. A kicker basically means a light that's behind the subject and it spills through to a part of perhaps their shoulder and their neck. It sort of comes around a little bit and gives them a nice dimension but it's not directly behind. It's behind but it sort of starts to spill around them a little bit. You've got hair lights which light up the rim around your hair. You've got edge lights which is just a nice name for going all the way around. A backlight is a term which encompasses all of the three. A backlight is a light which is just anywhere behind your subject relative to the camera. Backlights are great. Again, you'll find backlights in so many different films. Just pause the film and watch it and you can spot a backlight pretty much. Backlights achieve a few different things. The primary advantage of using some sort of backlight is creating a nice separation between your subject and your background. I've got a little bit of a backlight going on which is also doubling as my practical. Those tubes behind me are creating just a little bit of an edge around there. Sometimes I think a lot of beginning DPs put a little bit too much into their backlight. We can tell that it looks gorgeous and it's great and then sometimes it can be used just a little bit. It can be a little bit overdone. I think generally speaking, again, if we're keeping things within the realm of a natural look, generally speaking, if your backlight's really, really hard and really, really strong, it can be a little bit distracting. I would challenge you to keep your backlight a little bit on the subtle side. If it's invisible but it has an effect, in my opinion, that's a success. If it looks great but it also steals your attention, perhaps that isn't what's needed for the scene. We've got practicals which I've mentioned a few times already yet. Practicals are effectively any light fixture which is inside of the shot. You'll find these as lamps, as lights on the ceiling. You'll find these as candles. Basically, any sort of light fixture or light source that's emitting inside of the scene. Practicals are really good because they can help ground and motivate where your light's coming from. If I say motivate light, what I basically mean is explain where the light source is coming from. If I wanted a really nice, strong, warm light at a scene where someone's sitting in a bed and I want to explain where that warm light is coming from, I could choose a nice, warm practical which will help explain that. The practical will be emitting a little bit of light itself but you can help boost that with some fixtures that are offscreen. They can help motivate light. They can also just help create dimension and just look really great in the frame. The other really helpful thing a practical can do is create a little bit of texture and dimension inside of the frame. I think sometimes you might find a bookshelf or some sort of wall where if you find a practical that can actually spill onto that, you can create some nice shape with it. Be warned, a lot of cheap household practicals can do you a disservice. They might have a really magenta or green shift to them that can look very poor and they might be difficult to match potentially. Keep in mind what sort of practical you're working with, how much of the output it is. Frequently I find that practicals might be too bright for the scene. Usually I don't want the practical to overpower any of my other lights. So this might require a little bit of an ND gel, basically a black gel to help reduce the quantity coming through. But if I put a gel on it, obviously I can see that gel unless it's inside of a lampshade. So be careful about what kind of practicals you're working with. Best way to control your practical is to use your own. Aperture make these really great flexible lights called B7Cs which are a screw mount bulb which you can use and you can control remotely. They actually even have a battery power built into them if there is no power through the screw mount itself. You can control the colour, temperature of the colour. Really, really helpful tool to have. If not, maybe consider hiding some of the lights you have. I will frequently hide little tubes or little panels inside of the scene and basically I could even turn off the lights inside a lampshade and replace it with a panel which I have full control over where I can change the colour temperature to whatever I like. So be warned for household practicals. They're also your friends and they can help motivate light. This is the section where I briefly dive into Italian painters. We've got Rembrandt which famously used this triangle section of light in his paintings. I think a lot of Renaissance painters understood light really, really well. I'm not going to pretend like I know Renaissance painters inside and out but Rembrandt is famous for using this beautiful triangle of light that hits the cheek on the fill side of the face. So let's say this is my nice high key here. He would create a really beautiful little triangle that had soft edges and it's a really, really satisfying look. I think why this style of lighting is really desired is it's just very flattering. It defines the facial features really well. When you're trying to create Rembrandt lighting, just again be aware of where your spill is coming from. If it's spilling all the way around the side, you might lose that triangle and it does primarily need to be powering from one main source. If you have a really powerful fill or bounce, you might lose that sort of beautiful wee triangle there. So those are some things to consider when creating Rembrandt lighting. Chiaroscuro lighting is a type of lighting that really deals with light and dark in the scene. It deals with a lot of contrast and it really deals with shape and the way that light moves around the scene. You'll see this really famously on sort of shafts of light that will interact in an environment. It fits really well in a film noirish sort of setting. It's sort of almost the old school version before film noir was a thing. We had these sort of dimensions of light and dark. Main thing when we're looking to create this type of effective lighting is again to really control your spill. When I say control your spill, I basically mean make sure that your light doesn't spill into an entire scene. It doesn't spread everywhere in an entire scene. Again, ways to use this, use cutters, use negative fill, use honeycombs, maybe barn doors to help cut light so it doesn't spill into everywhere in the scene and that will be the best way to really craft exactly where your light lands. You can also use a lot of hard light in this. I think generally speaking hard light works really well when it's interacting with its environment rather than its subject. You can use hard light in spaces to create really striking dimensions. And this is a really nice technique to create captivating lighting in your scene. I mentioned bounce as a tool before. I just want to briefly mention it as a technique. You can use bounce really creatively, bounce lighting. One of my favorite uses of bounce lighting is actually bouncing on a table to light your subjects. This can be quite a fun sort of technique. I've seen this in an advert recently where they used actually a wooden table and there wasn't even space to light all that well. It was quite a cramped sort of space in terms of how they're setting up. One way of saving on space is actually moving your fixture back, putting on a fresnel and then heading into somewhere which you can bounce light from. If you want to bounce light, generally speaking, you're going to do better off if you can bounce it on a light subject, a white or close to white. Sometimes though using a table, they had a wooden table which created a nice warm glow. This can also work really well. On a recent shoot, I worked with my gaffer to bounce light throughout the scene. We did some really creative uses of this. We had light bridge panels, these sort of almost mirror-like panels which you can bounce from. They're a really, really great tool which sort of maintain the softness of the light itself and it's quite directional. It doesn't spill very far. There's a few things we did with this. We created shafts of light and dimension. I used one of the bounces to actually smack light straight into the camera lens at the end of one of these dollies. It was going along on a dolly slider. At the end of the slider, it reached this really strong shaft of light to sort of flare the lens. So you can be quite creative with the way that you bounce light around the scene. But yeah, it's a great way of actually moving your big heavy fixtures out of the way, creating a little bit more space and you can bounce it around. But you can still bounce hard light. You can bounce hard light with mirrors. You can bounce soft light with using large white sources. Bounce is a fantastic way to light your scene. A term you'll hear all the time is three-point lighting. It's probably something that you're maybe roughly familiar with before watching this video. Maybe you're brand new and this is the first time you're hearing it. But basically, it refers to the number of sources in your scene. If I say three-point or two-point or one-point, I mean three sources or two sources or one source. I want to briefly jump into how you can use three-point setups to your advantage and watch out for some of the really important traps. The thing is with three-point lighting is technically you've got your key lights, your most bright light, your predominant light on one side of the subject's face. Then you have your fill lights on the other side of the subject's face. And then you have some form of backlight. At the moment, in terms of the number of fixtures, I actually only have one fixture here. I've got some practicals behind me which are also doubling as a bit of a backlight. I've got a little bit of an edge here. It's a very subtle edge. And then I actually just have a big sheet over here which is bouncing back at my face. It's giving me a relatively low level. I didn't want it to be too, too flat. But it's helping sort of balance things out a little bit. I really, really highly recommend whenever you're doing some sort of three-point setup to use your fill as some form of balance. Watch out for using an actual separate fixture as a fill light. The main reason for this is watching where your shadows go. If I'm working with a key and a fill, I can run the risk of creating two shadows. Generally speaking, creating two shadows is pretty ugly, pretty undesirable. Especially if you're working with harder lights. Let's say I'm working with two hard lights. I have a hard key and a hard fill. I'll get a shadow on this side of my nose, then I'll get a shadow on this side of my nose, which looks horrible. I can also even have a shadow on the wall and on the other side. It's a pretty ugly-looking thing. I can't think of a good use case for having two shadows unless you're going for some sort of stylized music video, perhaps. A great way of getting around this is working with really soft light and also bouncing your light. This is already relatively soft. Maybe it would be nice to get it softer still, but then the bounce light is actually going to be softer still because it's going through a couple layers of diffusion here and then it's getting bounced on this side of my face. Three-point lighting is good to get familiar with. Know how it works and know the roots of it, but then don't rely on it too much. Understand the place for each light. The reason why I have a key is to illuminate my face, create a little bit of shape. The reason why my key is not directly in front of the camera is so that it does have a little bit of dimension to it. If I have my key light directly in front of my camera, it will look really flat. This does have a place. You'll find beauty commercials sometimes, cosmetic commercials can have a really flat light. They use that for a different reason. They want to show off the face in a very clean and very easy-to-see way. I want to see a little bit of dimension. I'm a three-dimensional person. I want to see three dimensions so I can move my light off to one side. I might not want to move it too far because I'm also not creating a really heavy drama. Like I said before, upstage lighting, if I were to move this light behind me and I'm looking this way, that would be a nice upstage technique. It's probably not appropriate for this video, so I'm going to put it somewhere in between. This is roughly about 45 degrees to my camera. This can move around a little bit. It's really common for your backlight to be on the opposite side of your key light. I haven't done that today. The main reason you would want to put your backlight on the left-hand side of me here is to create separation from a side which sort of lacks a little bit of separation sometimes. I'm wearing a grey jersey and I've got a black background. There's already a lot of separation going on. I've also got some texture. I've got some C-stands over here. There's also light spilling onto the wall. I'm not too worried about me merging into the background. If I was, perhaps I'm wearing a black shirt. It's a black wall. I could run the risk of sort of just morphing into the background. I might want to consider having a little bit more dimension, a little bit more backlight on my left-hand side, create a little bit more of an edge, and then sort of help separate me from the wall a little bit better. At the moment, I've just got, yeah, a little edge along the side of me. It's keeping it simple and that works for this setup. And as mentioned, I have just a sheet to my left-hand side which is creating a little bit of a bounce. If I remove that beforehand, I almost have pitch black. This has just helped sort of lowering the lighting ratio a little bit, helped bring it a bit more appropriate for the tone of video that we're shooting. That's sort of a simple three-point setup. You've got your key about 45 degrees in front of you. You've got a fill. Again, I would recommend going for some sort of bounce just to make sure that you're not really dealing with too much shadow there. It's a nice soft light. And then you've got some form of backlight, maybe in the form of a kicker, commonly on the opposite side of your key, but you can break the rules. You don't have to follow anything too finely. Learn three-point lighting, but don't be tied down to it. I think a lot of learning DPs learn how to do a three-point setup and then that's all they do for absolutely everything. It's definitely not appropriate for everything. Does it work for an interview setup? Yes, absolutely. Does it work for a dark thriller in the middle of a heavy scene? Probably not. I can't think of a good reason why. Learn the setup, but also be aware of its limitations and when you can and can't use it. If you want to recreate the setup, hopefully on screen right now you're going to see a bit of a lighting floor plan. I've got my key about a meter and a half away from me. I've got my fill just about a meter away from me and the backlight over here is about three meters away. They're all relatively close. Keep in mind, the closer your light is to your subject, the softer it gets. This is a principle that took me a while to wrap my head around. It doesn't make sense immediately. It's a really important thing to learn. The larger the source is relative to the subject, the softer it is. The easiest way to think of this is if you have a little torch light. It's a very small source relative to your subject. It's going to create quite a hard light. If you shine a torch into someone's face, it doesn't create a soft roll-off. It creates quite a hard shadow. However, if you bring a really large, let's say you bounce a light into a very large wall, the wall becomes your new source. Let's say you turn that torch, you bounce it at a wall, the wall becomes your new source. That's a very large source relative to your subject. That will be a really soft light. Maybe you've got frosted windows at home. If the sun ever comes through those frosted windows, they will become the new source. You'll probably find that's a really soft light. If you need to soften your light, think about how can you make it larger relative to your subject. Sometimes that's making your fixture larger or your modifier larger. Sometimes that's actually just moving it closer to your subject. It's quite easy to create soft lighting for a single-person shot. It's quite difficult to do it for a wide shot with maybe a group of people. This is when expensive gear comes into its own, is lighting for wides. There's some really cool rigs out there where you'll put floating lights or on cranes where they can light a really nice soft light for a wide scene. If you're not dealing with too much money, you might have to live with slightly harder light for your wider scene. A lot of people do it and get away with it because audiences aren't too aware sometimes. Sometimes you can get away with varying levels of light in your scene. Be careful of it. But again, to keep things simple, the larger your source is relative to your subject, the softer it will be. I want to spend a minute on how to recce a location or how to location scout. Location scouting is a really important technique to be aware of what to expect when you're going to shoot. Location scouting is almost always worth its time and the cost it takes for a few reasons. If you're hiring in gear and cast and crew, the cost of shooting is going to be considerably higher than the cost of you turning up on your own in your own time when you're not bringing in hired equipment. So any time that you can help reduce from on location or on set is going to be really, really valuable. One of the ways of reducing time on location is potentially being really well prepared. So knowing exactly where your light is going to be, how it interacts. So here's a few techniques as you go into a location scout. If you have the option to, I'd highly recommend location scouting at the time you intend to shoot. If you're looking to shoot in the evening, it'd be a good idea to go on your recce in an evening around the same time. The reason for this is you can get an idea of approximately what the light will be like. Things to check for is where is the sun in the sky at the moment. You can get a very affordable Sunseeker app on your phone or iPad and you can actually see, track where it goes. If you're going to be shooting there for the entire day or sections of the day, you can figure out where in the sky the sun will be. Another really important thing to check for is outlets. Are you working inside of a domestic house that you need to run off outlets? Where can you plug into? And also if you're using a lot of lights with a high draw, you need to be careful about not running multiple multi boards or extension leads out of one outlet. So you want to choose exactly where you can be plugging into. And finally, of course, it's really important to check the weather and predictions for what the day of shooting will be like. A compass can be useful for the same reason, to figure out where the sun is. Your Sunseeker app will work fine. Definitely bring a notepad to make any specific notes of, oh, at this time of the day the light hits through the window or there's this natural layer of diffusion with, maybe it's a frosted window. I'd highly recommend bringing a camera or you can get an app for your phone or iPad which you can actually visualize different focal lengths on. So if you're working with a DP separately or you're shooting yourself, you can get an idea of what the frame may be and what the lighting is required to work within that frame. Finally, if you have access to a light meter, of course, it's really advisable to meter the amount of light that you're working in, meter where the light is coming from, how far it takes to drop off and get an idea for what sort of output you're going to need and where you can put your lights in that scene. Okay, so first up we're going to take a look at a short walk. This was a fun project, about 30 minutes in length, quite a long piece which was written entirely to a pre-composed score. There was an orchestra that had already made this entire score for the film and the film was very much written to the music. It was quite special. So this is at the start of the film. This is the first scene. We see this old man. He's quite ill. He actually gets up from the chair later in the scene and goes to the kitchen and whatnot. But this part we just sort of see him drift off a little bit. This is the start of him going into sort of a mental journey, sort of a journey spiritually in his mind. So this was an early morning scene, meant to look like early morning. Hopefully it's convincing. We shot this, I think it was around 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon. So the sun was on the other side of the house, which is great. So it meant that we could add in all the light that we wanted and there wouldn't be too much affected by the sun moving around or going in and out of cloud because we could put in enough source ourselves that it would still be ambient light from outside but it wouldn't really affect this image too much. I just want to point out that there are two scenes very similar to this. There's this one and there's another one that happens at night. I can't actually show the frames for that one at the moment. But effectively it was the same setup for both with a couple small adjustments. This is pretty much the setup. It was really, really simple. So we have a 300X here, positioned outside with a fresnel on it, a projector mount. And this came in through the window. There's a lot of shrubbery in between the window that effectively worked as a natural gober. So it was shaping the light. It put these little edges on it. It put all the little leaf shapes. We actually had to cut it back a bit. It was a little bit too much. There was also this blackout curtain here just to make sure that we didn't have too much ambient light coming in. There was still quite a strong amount coming in. And then a 120D that was set to a more tungsten colour. And that was just offering a little bit of fill. It was set to a bit of a flicker, as if he had some sort of candle inside for the night scene. And then this flag here just to cut the light from spilling in the rest of the room. So as you can see we've still got a bit of contrast in the room. It's still quite dark. We've got contrast on this side of his face. What was really nice is the room actually was naturally quite dark. And it's really great working in rooms that have darker colours or darker walls. So you can add in the light where you want and it doesn't spill everywhere. You don't have to add tons and tons of negative fill. I just came in here on my Tilt-a-Float gimbal setup. It was a really slow push-in. And then there was a few different shots there. There was mids, close-ups. But this is pretty much it. Simple is good sometimes. So it was kept pretty straightforward. We did also block off this window here as well to make sure that we didn't have any spill coming in. One thing that is worth mentioning is we added this kind of diffusion layer here which just works really well as a silk in the curtain. I think it's quite believable. Morning light naturally is a little bit harder. Or it's a little bit more directional I should say. So adding this is a really nice way of offering another layer of diffusion so we get really soft light on him. But also it makes sense in the story. So art department added this in. But it's something that works really well. It looks very natural. It's very common to find these sorts of silk type materials in a lot of rooms. And you'll find this in a lot of different films. Maybe you don't want to show outside or maybe you're shooting in the studio and you don't have a background to show. Sometimes you can actually just keep it white. You can just pump light through the silk and effectively almost clip the silk. And it just has a really nice quality to it. And it, of course, just adds one more layer of diffusion. This becomes effectively the new source fitting his face. So we do have some harder edges down here. But they're OK because they're actually not hitting the part of the face. This is another technique that works really well. Because if you have hard light to include, try and push the hard light down further in the body if they're sitting down. And try and keep a softer part up top. You might need to adjust the levels a little bit. You might need to put a scrim, a flag, just to adjust the levels a little bit so that we don't completely overdo the lower part of your body. But, yeah, if you want to create some nice soft light, that works really well in the story, use the silk. That's a short walk. This is from a music video called Body. This scene had a boxing fight with two chickens. Two boxers that had chicken masks on. And we're trying to go for this quite grungy looking, sort of almost a fight club feel to it. That had, I don't know, that had sort of, that felt slightly otherworldly at the same time. I actually was going for more of a sodium vapor look. A sort of off yellow, very contrasty, moody feel. As my gaffer was sparking one of the tubes over her head, it was last set on sort of a crimson red color. And as it came up, I actually, I really liked the look of it. I said, let's play along with this for a second and see how it feels before going to what the original plan was. My mood board was very much for the sodium vapor look. As it turned out, I actually really liked the red look. And we pivoted quite significantly and effectively went with this red scene. Because it isn't really grounded in reality, and it is this otherworldly feel, we can really push it in any direction we want. And it's a music video. I mean, wouldn't be a music video if you didn't have some unusual colors in there. So this is the setup. We had a 120D with a projector mount that was coming in through here, offering a really nice hard backlight. A lot of haze. We had a smoke machine over here that was hazing up the entire room. It was a long, tall room, which meant that I really only had about 180 degrees of camera angle available. And I wanted to have the depth. So I didn't want to shoot towards the short side of the wall. So I wanted to shoot along here. The problem is on this side of the room, it was an active boxing studio, so there was a lot of just equipment, and it was a little bit cluttered feeling. Having all of this haze was actually a good way of covering up everything we can't really see. It's just this abyss, which works really well. So the two Voyager tubes here, the TS and Voyager tubes, they are set to this red color. There was also one over here, just to add a little bit of interest, that there was some hanging punching bags. So it was just to create a little bit of interest. And then to still push in a little bit of this tungsten look, we had a 300X with a softbox that went through a layer of diffusion. And that was just filling in a little bit of the tungsten feel. And then negative fill, just to cut some of the ambient on both sides of them. That moved around a lot. So as you can see, it potentially could be more contrasty. It could potentially increase that lighting ratio a little bit. I actually didn't mind it like this. It was relatively difficult to work with, because we did have three big white walls, and not enough negative fill to cover all of it. But yeah, this is the final look. Quite out there. But yeah, this is, I guess, one of the things is just being open and being able to lean into sort of random things that will come up on set. Like randomly sparking at this red, and then actually falling in love with it. So yeah, be prepared to pivot, and potentially change your mind about what you're going to do. This is a frame from a series of videos, a series called Reset. This was made about a year ago. There was a series of videos interviewing different people, and so we were going for this interview setup. So it was a multicam setup. We had also a camera behind his shoulder over here that was looking over so we could see an angle of the laptop, as well as a close-up of this. There's a few things I would change in this if I did it again, but there's a few things that I do still like. So the lighting setup in this was a little bit more complicated, but I was working with some relatively rudimentary equipment, because the key was done with a 60-watt light, which is not particularly powerful. So we had the Nanlite Forza 60, and that was actually in a softbox, and the softbox went through a further two layers of diffusion. I really wanted it to be as soft as possible, because it actually needed to cover quite a distance. So that's his key light hitting over here, the slightly cooler light compared to the light on the full side of his face. So that was positioned over here. I also put a curtain, a sort of black negative fill, just to make sure that, one, we didn't spill any light onto the lens of this camera, this is the B camera over here, so it didn't flare, but also so that we still maintained a little bit of contrast on this back wall. I didn't particularly want to backlight this one, but I still wanted to create separation, and so one way of creating a separation primarily from this chair in the wall, less so than him in the wall, because he's quite a light-coloured shirt, I put this little accent light behind the chair, which actually just lit up the wall, and it didn't really light up him. So that worked really nicely. As you can see, it's quite clear to see where the chair starts and ends. That's a good way of working around, if you don't want to work with the backlight, that's a good way of still creating separation. The fill was quite a distance away, so that's why it's a little bit harder than would be ideal. So it was a relatively far distance away, and there's just a couple panels here, these HR672s, Aputure Amaran panels, and they had a CTO gel. The reason for a CTO gel was basically to try and make it feel as if it was still slightly motivated from this lamp. I realise it doesn't look completely like all the light is coming from the lamp, but at least it feels roughly like the light on his fill side of his face is still coming from the lamp. So this was practical. If I had access to a different bulb in the time, I'd probably swap this out for a smaller bulb that I could stick underneath the glass part, because then I could actually ND it down, I could knock the level down. As you can see, it's just clipping here, which I think looks okay, but if I did it again, I'd get a smaller bulb and ND that down, so basically put some black ND around it, knock the level down, and then nothing has to be overexposed. The other main thing that I would do again is try and remove this double shadow. Generally speaking, double shadows look pretty unattractive, and they're not happening on his face, which is good, but they are happening on the set. So as you can see here, we've got this big black box here, which is getting a shadow on the right-hand side because of the key light. It's also getting a shadow on the left-hand side because of the fill light. This is one problem that you will need to watch out for when using both key and fill lights, because if they're slightly hard, they can create shadows on both sides of someone's face. Sometimes you get this with a shadow on the left-hand side and the right-hand side of the nose. Two ways around this is soften your light, make it much softer, bring it in and lower the level perhaps, but also consider bouncing light or diffusing it more instead. I personally quite like to bounce the fill. For this particular shot, though, it felt appropriate to try and motivate this lamp. So this is the setup. And then I had my A camera here on a slide that was moving back and forth quite a distance from the wall. I still wanted to create some depth, even though we're relatively close to the wall. This is quite a fun setup. This is from a short film, this old lady chasing down a mouse in her kitchen, and it had lots of moving parts to it. Things are changed, things that I like and would stay the same, but this is the setup. We're packing quite a lot into a very, very small room. Part of the fun with the type of projects that I do is usually just in someone's house. One real good positive about this kitchen was it had really, really high ceilings. There wasn't much space in the kitchen, but it did have sized ceilings, so we were able to put the stands on any height that we needed to and not really have to stress too much about the ceiling. This is the main setup here for this shot. Actually, there was actually one shot here where we had the final shot of the film. We had the track going this way, but this is pretty much the same setup for both. I wanted this overhead feel as if there was a low-hanging light in the kitchen, though we don't see it. Potentially could have added one in art department, but I don't think it matters too much. We can tell that there's some sort of overhead light here, and I wanted that to be the main thrust of the lighting in the whole scene. This is meant to be early morning, almost before the sun gets up. It's meant to feel quite cold and wintry. This is actually a part of the film where it does start to lighten up a little bit, but still pushing this quite moody sort of feel. My gaffer set up a really good rig here with these light bridge mirrors or reflectors, which we used for one of these close-ups here. Actually, when we were playing around with it, I wanted to have, because it was the very last shot of the film, I wanted to play around with it flaring the lens at the end of the track. We set one up here. It was a very small reflection that landed right at the end of the track. As I brought my camera around, the very last shot flared up the lens in quite a creative way. It's quite a fun technique. This shot that you're looking at here is a 300X put into an aperture lantern that was skirted on the left-hand side so that it doesn't spill onto this wall too much. We brought the table forward a bit so that it wasn't right against the wall there. Then there was... For this shot, actually, we didn't add any ambient from the outside. There was already a little bit of light outside at the time of day. Later on the day, we set up the 600D on the outside. This was just diffused through the window, which was just filling up the room a little bit. I didn't want to overdo it. Then this little practical. Once again, I seem to have a tough time with practicals. This practical was way too hot. If we could swap it out or have one of the aperture bulbs, it would have been great. We just have some other options. That was really the only option there. It was important to me that we had some practical in the shot. I think it would look a little bit too empty without it. But it really was too hot. It grabs your attention in this image. Your attention should be on her face. You do look at the lamp. I would have done that differently if I could have. I think, basically, what I need to do is have a whole bunch of practical options with me. Here's one of the close-ups from the same setup. We actually brought in another light here just to accent this frame a little bit more. This shot actually racks focus to the frame. The frame was quite important that it grabbed your attention. We just brought in a little bit more here just to give it a bit more interest. This is the same setup again. Actually, nothing changed with this shot at all. Massive amount of negative fill because we're working in a room that had near white walls. It was slightly off-white. But I think, yeah, probably the biggest take-home lesson from this one is just have options for your practicals. If you can bring options, that's great. Or chat with the art department to see if they can supply lots of options as well. I think I might need to invest in some more with the aperture bulbs. If I've spoken too fast and used terms which are new to you, we've written a wee list down below which you can check out to reference and hopefully that can make sense of everything I've just said. A lot of these terms are really important to learn. They're the language of talking light on a set. It's important to learn these now because ultimately filmmaking is a collaborative game and being able to speak the same language as everyone on set just helps make sure that the ship's running smoothly. I want to thank you so much for spending the time to watch this class. It means a lot to take the time out of your day. I hope this has been really valuable for you. As mentioned, do feel free to hit me up, show me some of your work. I'd love to have a chat and give some feedback. I just want to close by giving some closing advice for getting started and for lighting as a whole. I know exactly how it feels trying to create really beautiful lighting setups with relatively limited equipment. This is something that we'll always experience at some point in our career. Just because you might not have access to the equipment that some people do doesn't mean that your image has to necessarily compromise. There's a whole bunch of different ways of getting around this. Feel free to go give my work a watch and a follow. There will be links down below to my Instagram and website. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I hope you go and create some awesome cinematic lighting. Cheers, guys.