6 min Cinematography Tip: Lighting for Content Creators

1. Intro: This video, I'm going to show you how to light yourself or how to light a sit down interview. This is especially useful if you are a content creator. I'm F Trevino, and I'm a top teacher here at Skillshare, and I've been a professional colors for the past 15 years. I've graded 60 feature length films and hundreds of short form projects, and I've worked with tons of professional cinematographers. In this class, it'll be for everyone, especially for beginners. What makes this class different is that I'm going to show you from scratch with all the lights off, and I'm going to turn them on one by one, showing you the function of each one of those lights. For this project, it's going to be simple, simply light an interview or light yourself and upload to the projects page. So let's jump right in. 2. Lighting Yourself Easily: Okay, so here we are starting from scratch. A black, all lights are off in my studio. The only things on right now are this light right here, which is showing the outside natural light spilling in, and then also this background by slight is part of my grading studio. So I'm going to start one by one and show you what each light does. And also, for those of you that are curious, I'm not going to go a deep dive at all into cameras, but I am shooting on the Fuji film XT three with the 18 to 55 millimeter lens with an aperture of F 2.8. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it because this class is purely about lighting. Light number one for any lighting setup is the key light. If I turn on the key light, You get this here. I'm going to show you what my key light looks like. Basically, this is my studio. I have a key light mounted to the ceiling for those of you who want to know, it's a G Dox LL 60 W, which is a pretty not too expensive keylight which is fine. With that, you get something like this. You basically just want a big soft light hitting filling in all the shadows, that thing and that's the point of the key light, which is basically to do 80% of the work and light. Then light number two. To see that one, I'm going to have to turn off the key light again because one thing the only other thing that I had on actually that I didn't mention is a hair light. Right now, if you see this little high light and you can see how it's hitting my hand, it's a little bit of a warm yellowish light, you can see a halo on top of my head. I can dip back into it just so you can see it. That is a hair light that simply coming straight down and lighting me. Okay. And I'm going to turn this back on. And the point of the hair light is one of the lights that help separate you from the background, that helps create kind of a halo or a rim light to kind of push you forward so that you can be seen a little bit more clear in the image, and it just adds a little bit of separation between you and the background. In my situation, I'm going to show you what I have here, and I simply have this RGB light that's actually mounted to a ceiling fan because honestly, you typically just have to set up lights wherever they fit. It's clamped to that ceiling fan. Specifically set to 2,700 degrees Kelvin, which is basically a warm light. Think of a natural light bulb in your house. Again, don't worry too much about the whole Kelvin thing, but basically it's a warmer light to separate me again from the background. Okay. And so then the next light is something that's called a practical light. It's simply something to make your background look a little bit nicer. And again, you're going to notice a trend here that lighting is really about separating the subject that you're lighting from the background so that they stand out so that they're pronounced and so that they look good. So if you look back here, this little bulb here, I'm going to turn that on. That is a practical. I have it set up to a remote control on my phone. It's an aperture b7c. It's basically a smart bulb that you can control with your phone. Again, just like the top hair light, this light here is warm, 2,700 degrees Kelvin, which is warm light. Then the final light is one, which is really a background light, and that is this light here. As you can see, I'm going to turn that off again. There we go. As you can see, it basically is a way of making it seem like this light here is much stronger than it actually is. So when I turn that on, it basically spreads the light out. And if you want to see what that is, it's actually a light right there directly behind me. And that is another apature light. And you can see that is another apature light. Look, same thing. It's an aperature ameron 60 x S set to 12% 2,700 degrees Kelvin again. And we have this little soft diffuser on it. And it's simply just hitting the background, making this light here a little bit nicer. Okay. And so if I turn both of those lights off again, We have this, and you can see that all that we are left with is the hair light and then this key light, which by the way, is balanced to 5,600 Kelvin degrees. You have one that's 2,700, and this is 5,600, which basically just means that there's going to be some color contrast and my camera is balanced to this light. Just think of this as white light, and then think of these background lights here as if I turn them on there, think of these as just basically a color contrast. So we have white light contrasting with this nice warm light behind me back here, that again, the background is separated, from me. That's basically it. That's how I light myself when I'm filming myself. Of course, there's a lot of other things that have to do with cinematography and setting up a shot, which, like I mentioned before the cameras, that is coming in other classes. But for now, just remember that you need a key light. Hair light, and then some background lights, practicals. Okay, so that's the video. I hope you learned something. It was another short class. Please do leave a review. Check out my other classes. Check out my YouTube channel here, and of course, go shoot your own setup or go shoot someone else, post it to the projects page, and I'll see you all later.