Thinking Outside The Box: Lighting A Subject

Jeff Bauer contributes “Thinking Outside The Box,” an ongoing series of short columns covering a wide range of topics within the video world and how to use creativity, ingenuity, and problem solving to achieve unique results across all mediums.

There are so many different ways to light a subject that it would be impossible to list them all out. It depends on aThe Fountain wide range of technical factors such as the the size of your location, the time of day, types of lights, and creative factors like the story genre, and production design. Now if you spent enough time in pre-production, a lot of these details should be available, making a decision on a lighting style much easier.

Once you have enough details from the production, you’ll want to start planning out lighting basic diagrams and figure out where lights should go. I recommend that you watch films in the similar genre that you really like or that were critically acclaimed. Take some notes, scribble some basic diagrams down, and maybe try to recreate a scene that stands out to you. Then watch a few movies from the same genre that you hated or were received poorly. By analyzing the positives and the negatives from each film, you will have a better idea of what what you want to do and how you’ll do it.

Next, it’s important to think about the direction of the scene light and the different types of lights you want to use. If you don’t have any lights to use, you will have to rely on natural light and reflectors to achieve a proper exposure. The classic way to light a scene involves what we call a Key Light, Fill Light, and a Back Light. This describes the main source of light, the complimentary light, and the separation light. Of course how you arrange these lights with determine the type of look a you will get.

Finally choosing hard light or soft light can dramatically effect the way a scene looks. With gels and diffusion, you can create light that is more evenly distributed and softer looking, where as a plain light will cast hard light and in turn hard shadows. There are so many ways to mix and match and combine these techniques into something original, and only with practice will you get better. Go out and shoot something!

 

To get hands-on training on filmmaking and lighting, come to our Canon camera classes. The schedule is listed on the right side of this blog.

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