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Lighting Tools

How can I light this scene or this subject and make them look as good as possible? And that's your thought, which is exactly what it should be. In film, you were bound by the laws of reality. Remember that as we go forward here. Remember as a photographer, part of your value add is fantasy lighting, right? That's why they're paying you. But in filmmaking, if fantasy lighting doesn't make sense with what you're seeing in the scene from your wide shots, then something's not right. Then it's just kind of out of place. So let's get into a little bit of settings, I want to talk about here. 24 frames a second, and this is gonna come into play in lighting in a second. So that's why this is here. 24 frames, a second, it's actually 23. would be the exact frame rate, 24 for all prospective purposes. Is what you want to shoot, okay. Why? Because we have been conditioned since the dawn of our existence to look at a film, see 24 frames a second, and think cinematic. It's just human conditioning...

. When we're looking at 24 frames a second, and we see cinematic, when we see 29.97, which was 30 frames a second, what do we see there? (audience murmurs answers) We see television, We see television. Television is broadcast at 30 frames a second, and your brain knows the difference, and it feels very different when you're watching 24 and 30. And the whole goal in all of this discussion about gear and storytelling is to keep it as cinematic as possible. You want to remind your viewers of the movies and not of TV. And we're not talking about like Breaking Bad, Homeland, Madman. We're talking about the news, television. We're talking about broadcast television, not cinematic television, because TV has come a very long way in the last 10 years with their shows. And the frame rate you want it to, you want the shutter speed you want it to be double your frame rate. So when you go to the 29. if you have a client you're shooting a television commercial, and they say, we're going to put this on TV shoot it at 30 frames a second. You might get that request. Make sure you adjust the, the shutter speed to match that. I want to talk about Variable ND filters. Tiffen makes a variable ND filter, which gives you one to eight stops. And they make one that goes, I always keep it exclusively on my 7200. And the reason why you're going to want this here's here's what happens. You get one to eight stops who remembers the days of stacking ND filters? One on top of the other, right? And then you get the natural thing. Just to reminder, the reason this is important is because you want to keep it at 1/50 of a second, regardless of anything else, because that's the look that's most cinematic. So it's going to be perfect when you're in broad daylight, it's going to help you keep the shallow depth of field, because just because you, I say don't shoot wide open, just cause you can, but there are going to be times when you're going to want to, and it's going to help you maintain the desired shutter speed just as Jeff just mentioned. Look at this shot here. I'm outside, I'm in the desert I'm on a wide angle lens yes that is Kevin, he grew his hair out for that shoot. It's easy to keep, keep it properly exposed because I'm not trying to have a shallow depth of field I'm stopping as far down as I can go to make it as sharp as possible. So I don't have to worry about ND filters here that I can do in camera, but remember shot sequencing. I'm going to have to go into a close up at some point. So when I go here, that's a 7200 and that shot at 2. in the middle of the desert in broad daylight at noon. And I'm drinking hot coffee. I don't know what that had to do with it. I don't believe ISO 100 I don't believe in iced coffee. So the idea here is the variable ND filter has given me eight stops back. So I just closed that thing up and I get eight stops and that's why I can keep my shutter speed at 1/50 of a second. I can shoot it at two eighth and then I obviously have the ISO at a hundred. So that's a really, really powerful tool. And they're not that expensive. How much are there they? I don't know specifically, but they aren't that expensive less than $200, Yeah less than 200 bucks. So you definitely want to get a variable ND filter. It's a really powerful tool. And a lot of times I see people keep it on their camera and they might not even use it, but it's there and you don't have to use it. Just, you just open it up, just like, you know (murmurs) And then of course, when I'm going to my medium shots, I'm still keeping that 1/50 of a second look. Now talk about breaking the rules. We see a lot of slow motion. I'm seeing a lot of slow motion from DSLR filmmakers. Awesome, I love slow motion., don't get me wrong. But here's, you have to do it correctly. You're gonna want to do this correctly. So the first thing you want to do is to shoot it on the fastest frame rate possible. Which in our case is going to be 60 frames a second. What happens to the shutter speed? [Lady In The Audience] Double it. That goes to one, 1/120 of a second or 1/125 of a second, whatever it is on the DSLR camera. And this is art, not a science project. So when I say, keep your shutter speed, double your frame rate. That doesn't mean, you know, tattoo it on your hand and just follow it, you know, to a fault. There's going to be times when we're going to want to break that rule. And I would say the time when you want to break that rule, when you're shooting sports. Basketball, football, anything with fast movement. Boxing, right? We're fighting, you want to capture that movement. The faster your shutter speed is the less motion blur you're going to have. If you want to make this hit home, go out, shoot a clip of like a dog running or something at 24 frames, a second, try to slow it down, and then shoot it at 60 frames a second, try to slow it down and you'll see how much smoother things are when you shoot it at a faster frame rate. Now, when you shoot something at a faster frame, and you're going to double your shutter speed, what are you going to need more of? Light. Light. You're gonna need more light. So there's a high speed camera where they'll shoot like 700 frames a second, where they do the super, super slow motion. What do you think they have out there? Lights. Really powerful lights to just flood that scene with lights almost looks over lit in a lot of situations. So keep that in mind, you know, the more, the more frames you're recording, the more light you're gonna need. So let's get into some lighting tools. And I want to talk about where my lights are going. So we're going to set the lights tomorrow. And I use everything from a low pro light, which is how many watts are those? 200 watt light? The low pro. 250. 250, so 250 watt lights. I use the DP lights, which are 1000 watt lights. I use the lights in between, which are 500 Watts, The ambies. The ambies. So we have all sorts of lights. And a lot of times I'll put a light on a dimmer so I can dim the light and things like that. Here's the thing about film that you're going to want to understand. In photography you're capturing a single frame in film, you're trying to capture a moment across time. So remember the Facebook film when he gave his little speech about, he's addicted, according to Google research, yada yada, here's the lighting. Well, this is the first thing we shot because the sun that the window is behind him here. So there's a big bay window, the glass window behind him. So here's what we're doing. We're justifying a light. We're establishing what light is here. And the reason why is because when you're racing against the sun, it's slowly moving. As you're in between takes, it could take 45 minutes to get the scene correct. That sun's going to move. And on the back of your LCD screen, it's not going to look like it moved, but when you get it in editing, it's going to move and it's going to move quickly. This is such an important thing to understand, because all we have to do is get that one moment in time as photographers. But if you're doing any kind of work that requires continuity in your filmmaking, just a small change and in that cabin scene that we showed that bird's eye view with Kevin, we shot that thing all day long, and we are constantly having to move reflectors, add lights and add throughout a six hour time period as the sun was moving to make it look like that conversation happened within the same 20 minutes. And a lot of people say, oh it's digital, I don't need a light meter. Yes, you do. You want to have a light meter because a light meter can determine, you know, what's the exposure of different parts of my scene and you don't, you're not going to see the sun move with your eyes. Another reason you want a light meter is because oftentimes you'll do a shoot across a couple of days, and maybe it's from exactly the same scene and in some cases the same line, because you're going back or you're correcting, or you want something different and you'll have clip one from day one and clip two from day two, next to clip one, they have to match. If they don't match perfectly, perfectly light meter, you go there and you light everything. You like, you you meter everything meter the position and the amount of light on the faces on the background, on any part of the scene recorded it all and so then when you come back the next day and you're having to set it up from scratch, because you tore down your set, you can set it up and know that you haven't looked the same. The longest part of a filmmaking production is lighting, lighting a set. So here, when we're looking at David and the windows behind him, the reason why I did that is because of the time of day where the sun was in position to that window. And I wanted to get this shot over with so that when I moved behind him and you can't, you can no longer see the windows. I can center foil all the windows and put my own lights so that the sun doesn't move. What does center foil a window mean? Center foil just Is basically black moldable paper that's really thick tinfoil, essentially, that's black, and you can tape it on the windows. And it turns a day and night. It blackens everything. It blackens everything. It turns day to night, really fast, and you can reuse it and you know, you basically use it until it's just so destroyed you gotta buy another roll and it's pretty cheap. But you can see there's the shot. Look, look, look to the window on the left. What you see there is the sun going down, right? So here Daylight. Daylight. And then when I go here, the sun starting to go down, so this, you can see there's a light right there, outside that window. That's actually a DP light. And then you can see behind them. When I flipped to the other side look at the blue window, you can see the sun is clearly going down. So my idea is to avoid all the windows so that when I go and I'm actually shooting in this direction, it's almost nighttime here, but the light looks consistent. There's a 500 watt light outside of the house. Go back, please. Outside of the house, making that look consistent all into the evening and into the night as they shot, because when they started out, it was that light at the beginning of the day. Yeah so it's kind of a difficult concept to understand when you're doing that, because you're, the idea of, I want to make this light look as good as possible, falls behind what looks realistic and you know, how I make it consistent across time as well. You know, there might be there, might've been a moment in that day where the sun was beaming through that window and it looked amazing, but it's not realistic to recreate that for seven hours. So you have to think about what's realistic. And one thing I want to point out, you see the light bulbs, the actual lights I'm in the shot. That's a big thing in film, we call practical lights, the lights you can show a viewer is how you justify where your lighting comes from, which I'm going to get into big time in a second here. The Devil Angel, when we saw him on his shoulders, arguing with each other, we shot the green screen. This is what it looked like. You could see a total gym there. You can see our lenses, our coffee cup, you can see pictures. We just had him stand in front of there and just do his lines. But here's what we had to think about lighting, we had to almost light it flatter and bright cause we knew we were going to have those devil angel pop up in broad daylight. So we had to anticipate the light we were going to create the next day. And that's a big deal because if we wanted to really like this perfectly profile lighting with the perfect loop shadows, and that, that would be a photographer walk into this situation and light that with perfect portrait lighting. And then we would put them on the shoulders on the real scene, and it would look ridiculous and it wouldn't make any sense. And that's where photography and filmmaking, they ride parallel. And then when it comes to lighting, they just go off in their separate directions and they go off to their separate corners. It's just a different mindset. And then of course, we create that and it looks somewhat natural. And then even having the devil on the highlight side of the face, I'm almost justifying that that fake fire is lighting his face. That's why I put them on that side. So just try to emphasize that even a little bit more. What's on these lights here are gels. so a lot of times what you saw in the Facebook thing, when we were competing with those windows, daylight versus tungsten. So all the lights up, mostly all the lights I use are tungsten balance. And then the window obviously is daylight. So how do you get a tungsten light to match with daylight is you put a blue gel on it. Yeah et me talk a little bit about this. We're used to simply changing white balance in a raw file as photographers. It's pretty simple. We can kind of have like atrocious lighting situation out here, but because Photoshop gives us so much power and our raw file gives us so much flexibility, we can go and make something look the way that we want to. Let me tell you when you're shooting at 24 frames a second, you're shooting at 24 JPEGs a second. That's essentially what an H264 Kodak is, it's 24, very compressed individual photos per second and as photographers know, you can't go out there and work with the same latitude with a JPEG, as you can a raw file. So you're not going to have the ability to change white balance with hardly any degree of sophistication at all, which is why you have to make the light sources match when you're filming. So in the case right here, the main kind of light in the scene was coming from some windows. A lot of windows. Back behind the left. That's in the scene, but on their faces, we had to create all of that light. And the only way to make blue light of the scene with all the windows match the inside was to put these blue gels on them. And you can see right here, we're actually shooting into a Wescott Scrim Jim reflector with a very bright light to cast the main light back onto our subjects. But we've got a blue gel on there so that everything matches because otherwise, if you don't take the time to do that, it's going to be very awkward looking. In our wedding film, when we talked a lot about this, the one that Shannon and Amy went from earlier, unfortunately we had inside, we had windows all behind us. It was all daylight. And then all of our lights the kind of light the scene and the lights from the venue were all tungsten and we just had to deal with the clash because obviously it was an event, but if you're in control, you want to go ahead and you want to reduce that. And a question that might come from the internet or you guys is if you're in a situation where you have mixed, mixed light sources, what do you balance for? Balance for the skin of the subject. I would say that would be your role nine times out of is you want to, you don't want people looking orange or blue, unless there's some sort of psychological reason you want them to look that way, which we will get into in a second. And this light here, you look, how many lights are pointing into that reflector to create that and even still the window is blown out And notice that the light here and the light coming from the window, all match, they're all perfectly white because of those blue gels. So again, we're here, we're putting a blue gels on to try to compete with the windows. And when we got up into this office, this is Kevin Kubota's studio in case you haven't seen it. Basically what we did here is we had a very long shoot. We had a shoot that started at 10:00 a.m. and was probably going to go to 1:00 a.m. So we had lots of lighting situations to control. So what we did is out in the lobby, which is the, these two images, we shot a conversation that happened, okay. And we, the whole entire studio is surrounded by windows. The whole thing. There isn't one part of that room that isn't surrounded by windows, except for that doorway, which I'm in front of. Wow my hair is a lot shorter. And you can see that every single light, we have some sort of modifier we have a gel, we have an umbrella. We don't use harsh, direct light on people, rarely ever, unless there's a psychological reason for it. So what we wanted to do is create this scene and then go into that office right there and keep it daytime. That was our whole thought process on that day. So-- Even though we're going to have to shoot in the office in the evening, as far as the film was concerned, they were walking from a day lit, entryway into that conference room. And it was still daylight outside. It wasn't five minutes later, it was them walking into the room. So the light had to be the same. It's not going to change while you're stepping. So, and here's what it looked like on the left is what we shot in the office outside and on the right is nighttime. That's probably midnight and what's behind them. It's literally a bald DP light. There's no diffusion on it, there's nothing it's just blasted through the door, which is acting as our diffusion. And the whole idea there was, we were setting ourselves up so at the end of the scene, when Kevin opened the door and we were exposed properly for that room on the right, when he opened that door, when the camera was facing that light, it would just look like an all white room. And he would just walk in and disappear into an all white room. We're using these at weddings, the low pro lights. We, didn't, if you watched the first like four or five wedding films, I did the reception sort of doesn't really make the cut. And the reason is because I'm biased towards the image quality, you know, I don't have control over the lighting it's usually dark, so people can dance and they don't want you messing with their lighting and it's the whole thing. So reception footage doesn't always come out the way you want it to. So what we started doing, Jeff came up with an idea to put pro lights in the corners, put them up as high as possible, and then just angle them down on the dance floor. It doesn't really affect the lighting setup from the reception of what they wanted, but it gives us just a little bit of kiss a light so when you're shooting towards the light, you see that the guy on the right, giving the speech, he has a kicker light on each side. To give that shot a little debt. Very nice-- And you can see the lights in the bottom of the shot, the bottom one. And then when I'm on the other side, of course, it just gives a nice field light to the dance floor without really affecting the integrity of their-- We put them as high as they'll go, and then angle them down 45 degrees into each other And no diffusion, just so we don't lose any power because they're only 250 Watts. So we don't, we don't want to take over and put thousand watt lights, but we don't want to diffuse our 250 Watts light. Gives an nice, nice cinematic look. This is a shot from the birth announcement where we are doing the body parts here. And this is why you need a macro lens just for the record it is a macro shot. And at the (murmurs) is a three, five lens you're going to need a little bit of light. And sometimes I want to shoot those shots at a higher frame rate, 60 frames a second. So that if I do need to slow them down to really stop on the eye, then I can do that and you're gonna need more light. So what Jeff likes to do is take over the Wescott Scrim Jim with the light diffusion, which is behind you We gonna break this out break this out tomorrow and show you specifically. Put a DP light right on the outside of it. And then the Scrim Jim turns into just a massive like body length soft box, and that there is no sweeter light than that. And that's probably, you can almost see it in the reflection of her pupil there, where it is. And it's literally right there. And you know, you can't shoot a DP light into someone's eyeball. It just it's cruel and unusual. So, you know, you've got to soften it somehow and you can see it's really even, and soft. Now, which comes to my favorite part of lighting, justifying light. So justifying light is the theory of lighting in film that you need to understand because light has to make sense. So if I'm in a dark field somewhere, and I want to make a film of somebody in a dark field chopping wood, right? And it's 10 o'clock at night, where's the light coming from? [Lady In The Audience] The moon. The moon, exactly the moon. And that's it, and that's it. So if I want to light that scene, if I want to light that shot, guess what I have to do with my lights. I can't have a light come from over here and it kicker her light and put the perfect shadows. And that just doesn't make any sense. That's going to pull you out of the story. You don't wanna do anything to pull someone out of the story. So what I have to do is I want to set up lights. I have to make every light that I set up look like it's coming from the moon. And if I want to add another light into that scene, guess what I have to do as a filmmaker? Well, guess what buddy, you're going to be lighting some of that wood on fire. Cause I want some yellow light to come from underneath, right? So I'll start making him put light into the scene. So you see that the moon is part of the scene, art of the light, the fire will be part of the scene, part of the light. Those are practical lights, lights that I, as the viewer can see, which will justify the existence, the color, the direction of light looking at this shot here. If Jeff were looking at this from his portrait eye and judging the light, he probably slap me silly, cause there's nothing special about it. But in this situation, it makes sense. What I want to do color of light and film has psychological meaning. Red tends to be associated with evil, okay? So what I want to do is make this character seem very evil in the scene. So I have to, as the director put red light on him, that's what I want. But some filmmakers will go artsy and abstract and say, we're gonna let him read and that's it. I can't do that. I have a psychological block to doing that. So what I have to do is say, how can we get red light in the scene and justify the existence of the light? So I look for locations with an exit sign because that has a red light. Now let me ask you something. Do you think that exit sign above his head is actually casting that light? No. No way. It's not even coming from the same direction, but what happens? I give my establishing shot. I establish the scene. You, as the viewer, see the exit sign. And as the scene plays out that red light starts to move wherever I want it to. And the viewer just always associates it back with the exit sign and never asked the question. Here's what's happening. The exit sign tells the viewer, there's a red light in the scene. You can see it's in a bunch of different directions. Do you think people are watching this scene and saying, hey, wait a minute, that exit sign there's no way it's casting that red light. No, you're going to get away with it because if not your story sucks because they're looking at the wrong thing. Your story's good, you can get away with things like this. So when I say justify light, I don't mean literally use the light from the exit sign. I mean, give us some sort of justification for it. And then you can start to set up lights in places and then it starts to make sense. So that's why the photographer and the filmmaker don't necessarily get along and filmmaking because there's a million ways you can make this look better. There's a million ways I know that. But it's not realistic. And always has to be realistic. Remember this scene, right? The hardest thing to do in filmmaking is light a dark shot. Light night, okay, light night. This is a tongue twister, say that three times fast. Light night, light night, light night. It's hard because what's the first thing that happens when you put light on something? It becomes bright, you don't want that. You need to have mood. So, what I used here is we have low blenders actually that I used for this. And there are a daylight balanced or a tungsten balance. You can just dial it in to be either temperature. They're not super powerful, they're very soft, you can dim them. They can become battery operated. There's just one right above his head, bouncing on his shoulder, nothing on his face. I don't want anything on his face. I almost want to light his shape. So you see him there. I put the light on his head and then I have a light on her back, that's blue. So that there's a tungsten light on his head, and a daylight on her back. I'm balanced for tungsten. So that, that shows up as blue and how am I justifying that blue light? by the computer screen. So the computer screen and the lower light are working, together. And then I'm actually, I have a light up these stairs here, shining on that wall to just have a little bit of depth and shadow. So you see the theme here. Every time I light something, there's always something in the shot, practical light that creates the light for me, that justifies it for me. So when I walk into a set and I say, how are we going to light this? Tyler, is my lighting guy, my lighting extraordinaire right? He'll be climbing on ladders, hanging things from ceilings. And we always have a conversation. How are we joining in, how are we gonna join in with what's happening in the scene? We don't shoot natural light. We join in with natural light. And here's the pilot we shot, two weeks ago. And, this is a speakeasy. You guys don't know what a speakeasy is it's from prohibition days. We have a speakeasy where I live. I don't know why they have a speakeasy cause alcohol is perfectly legal, but you know, I guess it's a style thing, marketing. But, we light the two shot of them. And this is a very big location. So what's so challenging about shooting things like this is like Jeff mentioned, it has to be perfect. Each shot, you go from wide, you go to close. It all has to match. It all has to look like it fits together in the same lighting. So the first thing you do when you walk into a set like that, is you look at it and you say, how am I going to light this for a wide shot? That's how then you like the wide shot. You shoot the wide shot. You look at the exposure of something like this, and then you can subtly modify it to be what you want, but it can't be that different. So when I go into a closeup of him right here, look at how even the light is, it doesn't change at all. And practical lights. Here's, what's happening. All these lights over his shoulder, all that bocca. You know what that is? Those are bare bulb, low pro lights shut behind me behind camera in the reflection. It looks like streetlights outside. And then right here, this blue light above his head right there, that's like a little micro light. That's just a little micro light, just put up in the bar to create depth and layers. Every scene should have a foreground, a subject and a background, right? So I try to create depth with layers of light. That's like my thing. And then there's a wider shot of the bar. And you could see all those lights. And the reason why they're exposed relatively well is because we go in and we replace every light bulb in the scene with a 20 watt light or 25 watt light, a hundred watt light is going to blow out and you're not gonna be able to see it. It's gonna look crazy. But if you replace them with very low wattage bulbs, you can use them to justify. And you could see, we have lights hanging from the ceiling. We caught caught one here. So we hung all of our lights from the ceiling. You can get scissor clamps, they're really cheap from BNH. And if you have a drop ceiling, you consider clamp a light on a drop ceiling, and then you just run the core through the drop ceiling. And then your eliminate light stands altogether, Which is what makes lighting a wide shot so challenging. So here, one of the new thing I'm doing is I'm trying to create patterns on the wall. So I use a Venetian blind, light diffusion. I'm not actually creating with the blinds. I have to get center foil and just cut lines in it. And then it has to be a certain perfect distance from the light. And I actually have a light off camera, just splashing at the wall, creating that lighting pattern. But I justify it with the, again, I'm justifying the lighting pattern with a practical Venetian blind that's behind her. If that makes sense. And then I'm doing one on the couch over here and justifying it by that window. And then this is really important. the fish tank, because I ended up using the fish tank when we go nighttime as a light itself. So right there, that's a night shot in the same location. It's actually daytime. All we did was center foil the window. So there's behind those blinds. There's just a bunch of center foil on the windows. So it's completely black., we light the scene. And do you think a fish tank would create a perfect loop shadow on her nose? Absolutely not. We turn the fish tank off and then we put a microlight there's someone holding it right there, like this, just putting it on her face. And it's the same color as the fish tank light. That's how we justify it. We show the fish tank and then when we show her, we put our own lighting in place.