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Lighting Setups Q&A

So a question from Adrian, If you want to do camera movements where you're showing all 360 degrees, how would you go about lighting those scenes? That's really difficult. So you're gonna rig all the lights? That's why clamp lights are really great. You can rig them up on things. When we did. Ah, one short where we had a lot. We should not thrown at 60 degrees, but about 1 80 we showed this entire room. So we're rigging it on like fan blades on the tops of curtains near the window and things like that just rigging the lights. And that was bouncing off the light to fill the room. So we have sort of fill, and then everything else is sort of accent light. So we couldn't really light the room like we wanted to, cause how much we're showing. So it was filled the room and create little accents of lights Where? Okay, the actor goes to this mark, and we're getting a nice accent. Right Here goes this market a nice accent right here. And that sort of created our contact contrast and filled out th...

e room. All right. Cool is that good one had asked, How do you like places with extreme amounts of light? Like when you're in a desert? Then you're you know, you're at the mercy of the elements a little bit and you're working with that, Not really against it. So again, it's about like we showed before, backlighting the subject with sun. So using bounce lights, correcting the exposure for the environment you're in and then just building on top of that. Okay, well, maybe we can have people at home jump in the chat room and suggest something that they want to see. You dio take a minute for me to get that through the chat room and everything else, but that might be kind of an interesting way to, you know, teach for the next few minutes. Sure, you guys have any questions or we do go ahead for the fog. If you want to use like a fog machine, it's really cool. But if I did a photo shoot on location where we dragged a five machine in a car, battery didn't work as well as we had hoped, but you can get like those cans of air for cleaning your computer effects stores will sell those that shootout fog so you don't need a power source, and then you can just use their more mobile, too. So you could just, like, shoot your dry eyes villa. Great of that great solution to, but that just drops. This is a bit different. Any other question? Before we wanted something else, uh, question came in just from Grubben. A lot of the lighting causes some glaring sheen on Ryan. What do you recommend for easy makeup without a full makeup artist really talking about how dirty pattering about finding you know what, what matches their skin tone and keeping them powdered. So you're not getting that sort of sheen that you'll get from like sweat and such as the day goes on, which the opposite of that was, If you want sweat just a little bit of olive oil in a spray can with water. So it's a bunch of water, a little bit of olive oil, and it will stay on the skin and even if they're not really sweaty, still kind of look sweaty because it's like greasy looking. So that's a great way to keep your actor sweaty throughout the day without constantly having to drench them, because if you hit him with just water and you're outside, they're going to dry in two seconds. All right, let's see, there was a request to show up. Stage lighting up. Stage lighting. Yeah, about that I have no idea. Let's Google it Google thing. You know, this is guerrilla filmmaking, and I do everything because I have to, not because of a specialist at any of it. You know, what I do is I'm a writer director. That's what I specialize in. That's you know, once you know, when we get a big crew, that's the thing that I'm doing. I'm writing the piece. I'm directing peace, sometimes even just directing, not even writing a peace. Beyond that, the effects cinematography, audio. We do these things because we have to, not because it's our specialty, right? So cinematography and others, you know that I'm not afraid to say I don't know and we're learning and you guys have had some tips that I thought were great so far. But that's what's great about the community that's currently built. We all kind of work with each other and passed ideas back and forth like the D I Y stuff s So there will be some stuff that I'm not good to know. Uh, cinematography. I love it. But, man, it's not my thing. Color grading. That's the other one. Audio and color grading. That's probably my weakest. What about lighting and really small spaces? Uh, you know, soft. It depends on what you want. If you want something really contrast that you could bring in a heavy light and you're gonna create crazy contrast because you're in a small space and you just light for that light and you're gonna get some super harsh shadows on that. That's what clam flights preach. Clamber lights is just this entire time. They're awesome. And they're really great for small environments because you could just get them anywhere like we're showing. Dimmers are really great for controlling the intensity of your light. Gels are often times better, but just smaller lights and then modifiers for those. All right, well, you mentioned you have some other things you want. Yeah, I think I saw Question, Let's start with you. I know in that in the editing process, you're doing like you said, color, grading and color correction, all that kind of stuff. How much does the lighting of your seen depend on what's going to happen in post? So I try to do everything in camera. I'm not the best colorist I get by. So I try to do as much in camera as I possibly can, which I think everyone really should. If you're not, you don't really know what you're gonna have imposed on you creating all these like power windows, air Mass to try to fill everything in. And it starts getting a little artificial. Eso I try to do as much in camera as I possibly can every time. So my question is, if you're trying to light a room, um and you have a bunch of can lights or something, like I often get a lot of shadows and artificial shadows or several shadows. How would you try to eliminate those controlling shadows? Yeah, it is a little light as possible. There is a little amount of fixtures happening as possible. So if we have these going and then I have one here and I have one here, we're creating three shadows of me on the floor right now. Let's consolidate that one one light right there and then we'll fill in a little bit next to the camera for filling in next camera. That's one reason why I keep Phil. Next camera is we're not creating this. Another shadow that's going on here. If we have it over here, we're sending my shadow. That way we put in the camera. Well, then I'm blocking it because it's right next to the camera and back lights, not really gonna cause, you know any shadows at all. Also, soft lights are going to soften up that shadow so they won't be noticeable. So it's a matter of consolidating how much you're using eso. You're not throwing shadows all over the place. Fill light is never a solution to get rid of shadows. Some people will throw light on a shadow on the wall, and it's just awful. That's never, never a good solution any others. Before we try something else, you know what? Let's let's build the book light again. Let's do ah, set up just with the book light so you want to come out? You wanna come up? It's crab to see stands popping here. Let's get the lamp lit struck the lamp in right here. Like college in here. It really does. We're gonna use the book light, as are key to get a really soft light. Then we're gonna try to see if we could fill the other area and create a point of interest with this lamp here. When a man camera. No, You guys mount that up. Josh could get another stinger over here. Stark. Wanna grab me another C stand from up there? Or we could use the strength D C stand. Bring that this way just to remind me of my power. We're gonna run that for that. Uh, they got a good, actually. Yeah. We're gonna run it for the par lights. Grab me the bounce. Let's, uh let's drop this for now until we're set for it. So everybody could see what's happening. You know that we could put a light behind this and do like a sexy dance show. That's cool, too. That thing looks ridiculous. It's a real thing. Yeah, why not? Film. All right, we're gonna bring that right to there. Uh, you know, often that actually lets go and run that back up, remembering that share right in here. Yep. So we're gonna use this book light as the key and a very, very soft key. Go ahead and kick that. Angle it on the board here and kick that on. Let's move that back a little bit, right? There's good little forward, actually. And actually, let's put this on on the dimmer. Yeah, Stark. You want to sit there for us for a second? Let's bring the light in, Josh. Bring it on the other side of the sea. Stand way. Let's Let's take this and truck. Josh, Let's take the mole and let's chuck it. Uh, let's go to feet this way. Wow. Okay, this isn't gonna be dimmable, so go ahead and flick that off. You leave it. Leave it right there for now. Let's see if we can balance that. So I didn't turn it on. Yeah, that's going to be too much. Let's move that out. Do we have another lamp we could bring in? Yeah. Let's grab one of the grab one of these guys. You told it. You wanna come over here, Grab this light off this stand. Good. Set the light down. Bring the stand around. Josh, Can you grab me another stinger. If that one's free, I'll take that one and a clamp Light. Just move that out of the way. Way. That's something we can throw that on. We got a little table is an apple box. Things is a cool apple box. You got half quarter. We got a couple here. We can show you guys a little bit later. But these things are great just to have short actor stand on them. And what have you Actually, that would be better, because I could have We're gonna go handheld with this. You? Yeah, You got distances. She's happening. Let's get a stinger on that. No. Really gonna have you sit on that and go hand held in a sec. So fierce punching on stark for me. All right, go ahead and grab that shoulder piece. Wait there. Wait. Female. Thank you. Way Got that in shot. Good. And pana are zoom out. Just a touch. That's good. So fierce, Stark. We go ahead and bring these lights down of it. Thanks, bro. So we're gonna we're gonna bring this light up a touch using this guy. All right? Is that are we dimmed on this bold Is that the full extent this book? All right, take it all the way up top. Have you go hand hall and held with this guy? I said on Fox. Yep. That's what that's for. You're not dying. Trying to squat down for the shot sick. Got it. Got it. All right. It's for him. Up somewhere in this. It's actually let's go. Yeah, that's good. Let's Ah, drop the Irish down. Don't keep going Right around there is good. All right, so now we have this light that lights not really doing much of what we wanted to do. So we're going to try to accent that. Bring it up a bit. Do we got a stinger over here? Josh, can you pull around another stinger for me? And could we get you want to grab me a clamp light? You got it. It's gonna be turned on and just shine right in my face and know success did it. Josh, you want to just stay here with this light? Baby said we put been, you know? Yeah, it's hooked up to the light. That's not on you. Go ahead and reverse those like the longest extension cord in history now, eyes. Okay, so now we're gonna use this light eyes to sort of act as our lamp. If it doesn't shut off on us, find where it makes sense to be the lamp and sort of hit it there. Let's go ahead and kill. Let's go and kill that light back there. Let's switch she exposed to make this light. Okay, so now we have a practical happening that's giving us some lights. Not overexposed. And we're using another light toe. Accentuate that. And it looks like it's coming from the lamp, but it's not at all. We're not getting anything from the lamp at all, but we bring in another small light, and now we're getting what we need. So we're not over exposing that lamp, which is usually an issue and looks really nasty. And we're getting the light source that we need on our actor. Good. And put that back on. Good. Good. And flick that back off. Actually, let's stick with this sort of thing. Let's get a little tighter on him. All right. Now you wanna get up a little bit, Gonna stand up, I'm gonna shift you. Let's go right here. Now We're just toying around with angle of light again like we were talking about before. That's really ugly. Let's get rid of that. An angle of light as compared to what? Where the cameras start. Look over here. For me. It's kind of like the shed a little bit. We're getting more contrast on its face now. And the daylights actually helping us in this shot, I'm actually liking what's going on with the blue, which ever make Buddy makes fun of the orange and blue. But the reason that happens because of color contrast there you know those opposing colors that makes really, really well together. So we're getting a nice skin tone we're getting, Ah, a color contrast happening on the back with the blue So the daylights actually helping us to make a really interesting looking shot and I would actually rule on this. I think this looks pretty solid and I like and this is a good example. The shade. We don't even have a light modifier with us, but we can use a shade just to bring in the right here for me. Bring in the shade just a touch to create a little bit of depth or without it to touch. Flatter if we like that or not. So you can use things to break up the light a bit, a little bit to create more depth, More layers of contrast. We got no backlight happening either. This is a one light shot, and I'm really digging what we're doing with this, right? You want to stand up? We could bring up the lights a little bit to move away from lighting just for a second. You want to Ah, Walter, you want to move this back for me? You could just put the chair on the back there. Yeah, back. So we have Josh operating handheld, which could be very, very tricky. Especially with a rig like this. We can't really see where you're going. And Josh wanted to stand here for a second for me. And you want a wrangle Cables happening here? It's on, you know. Let's just look, let's just break this off and bringing around. That's what I do, man. I said I was a director, didn't I? All right. And, Josh, you want to come this way? When you're ready, you just gonna wrangle that cable? That's good. All right. So you're gonna want to keep the slack so he doesn't step on it. Right? And then let's get one more up here saying you want to try this. So you're gonna spot him, He's gonna be walking backwards, right? Let's Can we go a little further towards Josh? Josh Eagan back up. You're gonna keep one hand on his back, and you're gonna guide him. So you're gonna be his eyes. What? He walks backwards. So, Josh, glad and walk foot with us and then just tapping when you need to stop, you got to go tap him. And now he knows they need to stop so he could just focus. Now go forward something he could just focus on the shot. And you have somebody hand on him, making sure he's not tripping. Dropping the rig and taps. Stop. There you go. So he's free to move around and just focus on the shot because you have a spotter. You go. You know, free hand held like that with the rig. Especially if you're doing something fast. Something fast moving even something slight like this. Good. And come back to us again. You really need three people you need somebody ringing the wall wrangling the wire. If you have video village and you need a spotter happening and sometimes even Ah, you know, a focus puller as well. Cool. Drop again. Thanks, guys. Waken drop this back on a tripod. Uh, go all day, man. Let's kick this light on here. We didn't the lights down you go. Hold up the effects, guys in my am I right. So let's actually get this on the dimmer. You wanna get Walter, you want to come over here and throw this back on the dimmer And again just talking about, um, sort of angle of light where you're placing your light to find the contrast. Sometimes it's just moving the camera around, which is really why I like handheld. A lot is you just move around and find where the light's most interesting sometimes. What's way? Bring that up a touch. We got that on the dimmer way are realigned. Tungsten. Yeah, I got I got your But you all right? Let's go and just stand up with this focus. All right, let's drop that down. Look right here. Truck in a little. Come around a touch pull focus on that. Getting a lot of that daylight on him. So, Bill, you want to come up here, See if we can flag that often. Like wrapping too much with that daylight so we could always shift Thio more daylight balance. Or we could grab some CTB. And actually, you want to come over here, go ahead and drop down that light saying we want to relocate this to the back there. Give me three more c 47. Let's just cut that for a second. We're gonna use the C 47 to mount on to the barn doors. Grab. Just go with two for now. Don't really need to worry about it too much. It's kicked out on see what it's looking like. All right, Well, such the daylight. Cool. Much better. So now we balanced out. We've matched the room which were talking about before how to modify that We through just one gel on there, the CTB, and let's take it back up on its Ah, crank that up. Just a touch. No, Suck up here for me. Great. Let's get some balance. Let's get the phone booth. Let's bring in listless sort of create a kicker. Bring it back that way. Just a touch. Let's go up with it a bit. Back that way. Just a touch. And then once again, we got a really dramatic sort of look with one light and foam core. And, you know, this could be can light, which is bringing in a little closer. And we're getting the same sort of look, and we have very, very dramatic sort of. Look, the short we did losses was basically entirely lit. Sort of like this pretty much one light the entire time. But finding that angle of light to find the most dramatic angle. Let's go ahead and face this way. Why should bring it all the way around? I got you same lighting set up, but using a different months, the background coming this way, let's get the same sort of kicker happening on him. But we've completely changed the look of the shot just by moving where the camera was set, opposed to where our key was set up. So choosing that is going to really, really, uh, mold what your tone is. So let's just truck back around. Let's just look at what the difference and you know, you move in with him at the different shapes were getting right there. Let's go back a little bit more. Let's try to let make it bleed over is it was just a touch, just a different sort of tones that we're getting just by moving around. The subject, as opposed to where the light is hitting him, does pretty much everything, which is what they mean by you could go ahead, sit down, which is what they mean by flick on a light, See what that's doing and go from there. So you go with one light and see how you can mold that light to really hit the tone that you're looking for, reading a lot of thriller and dramatic type tones because that's kind of my thing when we're really pushing it. That's really what I like for we can get into some other things of you guys have a certain type of lighting set up that you want to do weaken play with some of that tomorrow. There's not any more questions. Okay, Way could kill that. Bring the lights up. Let's get that off You all right, Let's you and then we'll wrap it for the day. So question came in. How do you generally light for multiple blocking marks? Do you prefer consistent light or to have your actors travel through lights? Um, hominids, say travel through lights. Always it's it's farm or, well, you know, there is no always it's got it that it totally depends on your scene. You know what you're looking for. If it's more of, ah, you know, sitcom me feeling comedy, you might want to keep it a little more consistent, but I like to break up light. It's a lot more interesting toe walk through, you know, even if it's very, very subtle shafts of light than it is to walk through one. Very even with that lamp, the lamp is a good example, kind of a quick example, but of just moving the lamp out, who moving in and just a touch. So we're getting the slightest shadow right here. That's noticeable to us because we saw the before and after, but nobody's going to notice it. But that little extra depth that it's giving is actually doing a whole lot. So for me, I really like to break it up, have him travel through create interest. Question. Would you attempt to recreate a golden hour shot with lights? And would you also do that outdoors? And that's cheers from Kristen. You could definitely do it. Uh, my dp friend calls just right before it's There's no light left, he calls. It blew our the sun's gone and everything is just so blue. But you still have light. In that moment, you could recreate Ah, golden hour. But other than that, you wouldn't really be able to do because even if on a low budget scale, for sure, you would have to flag out what the sun's doing on all of your subjects and then light accordingly. And you could probably get the subject to start looking like that. But the backgrounds not gonna look like that at all. You could definitely do it indoors, flag out all the windows and recreate that. But outside, you're gonna have to worry about the background. So it really depends on how you're shooting it possible. But you're gonna be very, very limited. Okay, cool. Do the key back and fill lights all have to be different lines. Where can they be the same. They could absolutely be the same light, and then you could bring in gels or other modifiers to alter them and make them look different. If that's what you're looking for, sometimes with like we were using very different lights for the key and Phil, that's not usually the best ideas you saw. One was a bit warmer than the other, which created this, you know, cool, but could be off sort of look, depending on what you're doing. So it's good to have those pretty close that way. It's not looking like two different lights on your subject. You're having to things that are very balanced ones, just controlling the contrast. That's all it's doing, and the other is your main light for the scene. Backlight. I like to make different, uh, make look a lot different. Doesn't have to be a different light. It could be the same. Could be all can lights, and you're just modifying those with gels or other ideas. I use windows like this guy. Maybe we'll do that tomorrow as the backlight let that be like more of a cooler light and then light the front accordingly. Sweet. Okay, lend? Rick asked. Well, bringing down the contrast in camera and defusing harsh light help, retained detail and busy scenes bringing down the contrast and camera. You can't really bring down the contract on camera. You can bring down the intensity that so you'll be stopping down or, you know, changing your eyes over Iris or whatever it is like we were talking about before. So you can You can change how much light the sensor is accepting. But contrast is computer purely gonna be controlled by what you're doing outside of the camera with lights but balancing everything out and not having it so contrast like we showed with defusing the sun we had where I was able to balance everything and have a lot more detail in the background and on Todd because we weren't going so harsh with that extreme sunlight on one side of his face and then really deep shadows on the other, waiting outside for proximity. Did you have any sort of like battery powered lighting? Or were you just off the some 100% available light? If we went with any kind of lighting whatsoever would have gotten done. We had heart outs for the gear that was loaned to us by Lens pro who are lovely people. And we had actors that were had a hard out. So they had that flights. They were gone. So I only had 10 days to write and shoot thing. So by the time we were there shooting, if we were worrying about setting up lights, let alone camera, let alone rehearsal and let alone coverage, there's just no way we're going to do it. Which is one of things when we're talking about the limitation thing. That's one of the myths. We were very, very limited with proximity, which is why we're able to knock it out so soon. I knew Bill could get me the shackles. I knew we had this sort of location. I knew we had these certain actors. I knew we had this kind of wardrobe left from the last project we're about to do and then did it. So I'm like, Hey, they're not zombies anymore. They're prisoners were torn up clothing. Look at that s So we threw that on them and then, you know, the idea birth out of that, that I wrote my buddy Seth Werleigh. And then it all was dictated from that and I knew we had to go available lighting. So it was all and we lucked out. We got a lot of overcast, cause that's what the look I I wanted. I didn't really want that harsh sunlight. Look, we added a few times, but when it happened, it was in situations where we can control it, which is really hard. Were in an open field trying to control that, that because they would have been, like, all nice and soft and then the background. We've just been like sunlight. So again it's, you know, knowing your limits and go in quarterly. Try not to push past What's gonna, you know, cause you to fail on those days, any others for a lot of the lighting set up to showing up us today, it seems like like where the placement of things are very, very particular, and if the subject moves at all a little bit, it may destroy that. Look, how do you what do you do when your character start moving or talking or being well, I mean in the shots that we had this most of those are thinking about like a dialogue scene. Two people sitting and talking to each other when you have people moving around you just like for that mark one mark to mark three. And I think that's a lot can be a lot more interesting of a shot. Because if we haven't set up, this is my one. And we haven't set up how we had that stark shot set up that I love so much with the lamp. Really love that. I wish. Did we roll in that? Because I want to see it again. Um, you know, he moves from here and we kind of get more soft, sort of fill light until he hits here and then we're getting another one. We have this interesting, interesting, like move from A to B, so you'll just set it up for that, which will talk about blocking a bit later, and we'll light for that. But that's it makes the shot mawr interesting. Not so much more difficult, which is what we're talking about before with tell how we let that one scene. There's things hanging from from fans and things like that because we didn't have a ZMA any lights and rigging as we needed, we sort of filled the room toe, have a nice level and then created accents of light all over the place to make it interesting for them to walk in and out.