Transcripts
1. Course Introduction: everyone. Welcome to a new section in the cinematography course today. We're talking about lighting now, for those of you who are new to video, aren't coming from film school. You probably haven't played a lot with video lighting, but it is a very important part of being a cinematographer, especially when you start to shoot more commercial and narrative work. Even if you're shooting documentaries, weddings. It's important to know what types of light sources there are, where they're coming from, what light temperatures they are and how to control that light to get a great scene. Now in this section, we're just talking about different types of light lighting safety, and that kind of stuff in the next section will be covering demonstration and how you actually control that light. But for now, let's learn what lighting is and a little bit more about the technical side. I'll pass it over to Will
2. What is Lighting?: So this section want to talk all about lighting? So what is lighting and what lights should you be using As a cinematographer and a videographer and a DP really are gonna be surrounded by light all the time, you're gonna be wanting to use it as much as you can. Most of the time, If you're not shooting natural light, you're gonna be creating light with lights. So real quick, Let's run around, Uh, you know, run around the world and just kind of talk about what lights there are. There's tungsten lights. There's daylight lights. There's L E D lights. They're small lights. There's big lights. There's light panel lights. Really. There's a plethora of lights for this. I've elected to use a Felix lighting kit. These air smaller little led lights. But they really how's everything that I really want to talk about? As faras lights go, generally, you're going to use lights as sources to light people to light rooms, toe light subjects, really anything and everything, especially if you're not shooting outdoors or shooting an event outdoors. You're gonna be using lights to create the look in the mood of what you're trying to say. from a lighting perspective, there's several ways you can use lights. A lot of people use lights in very different ways. The most popular way, obviously, is shooting the light directly at you. You could then use barn doors to kind of shape that light, or you could do a shoe through. Here's an example. This is obviously a big example, but diffuse light a typical way people do would be using soft boxes. Soft boxes are able to cut the light down and really hone, and we're doing. I'm actually using them right now. They're using the left and on the right, and you'll see me use them later in a demonstration. But the big thing is that you're able to diffuse the light reflected and focus it on the subject. You can see here that you look at my face like in block the light on either side, and you can see that that's really soft light. It's not as harsh as this backlight. I mean that you could see this backlight if I step back how harsh that light is on me much harsher than a soft soft box in front of me so you can see The slight done here is bouncing off this right here. You can't really tell from where you're sitting, but that light bouncing off the white is reflecting light on me, and that's even softer light, then the light bouncing from the soft boxes. So that's really the third way that you can use lights. So shooting through diffusion, hard light and then soft bounce light. The real take away here is knowing what to use and when. There's also multiple types of lights, and there's multiple ways of lighting something. You have to find what works for you and how you want to speak as an artist and what your project's gonna need specifically.
3. Understanding Color Temperature: So let's talk about color temperature. So in color temperature, there's a scale called the Calvin Scale. Now, on one end, there's warmer lights, and on the other end there's a little bit cooler or bluer lights. Now the Kelvin scale kinda distinguishes. Where you're like they're using is on the warmer light end. Around 323,300 Kelvin would be tungsten lights and candlelight. So on the other end, on the cooler side, we have the sun. Daylight fluorescents are before that. So really, there's a spectrum of color, and that's where you kind of have to understand and tell your camera what light you're shooting to make it look white to make it look a clear, white kind of light coming in, you need to tell your camera exactly what Calvin or what temperature you're going to be shooting it. You can mix temperatures. It's kind of fun to do sometimes. But for purposes of right now, I'm gonna tell you exactly what we're dealing with. So right now I'm shooting with tungsten lights are Felix. Lights can change color temperature with a knob on the back. Some led S and some smaller lights are capable of doing that, which is really convenient for if you're trying to match daylight coming in, we're trying to match like a sconce on the wall or some sort of tungsten light. So the best way to show you this is to turn this on eyes but making. And right now I'm balance that tungsten. Now the lights I'm using. You see my backlight, Mikey, lighting fill light here and my white light are all met. Measured tungsten Right now I've also told the camera to be measuring at tungsten so it looks clean. It looks white. It looks natural. But if I did tell my camera that it was daylight, I look really orange. So you see now were measured. A tungsten light were using tungsten lights. And what I do now is I'll take our little Felix and you could see the light right here and it's balances why? I can slowly change the color temperature and move it all the way up to 5500. It doesn't help that my shirts blue as well, But now you can see this light is very blue on my face. It's much more blue because it is daylight and it's extreme for what? We're trying to capture the 3200 adversely. If I would switch everything and I was measured the camera back to daylight. Everything else here is now orange because we're balanced to daylight and this light looks much more white. It looks much more natural because we're telling the camera that this is the temperature that were shooting at. Now we're back to our tongues and balance, and I can see I can shift this back to tungsten light, and now it just becomes a nice, bright white convenient light. It's important that when you're shooting, you set that immediately when you're shooting, because it will change the entire color of what you're shooting. You don't want to go outside and have it set to tungsten because, like we showed, you hear everything will be super blue because that's what daylight is balanced, that you don't want to shoot out. She don't want you inside and set your your balance to daylight because if you're using tungsten bulbs, everything will be really, really orange. The best thing to do is to make sure you understand where you're at double check your preset settings on some cameras on other cameras. You can actually go in and select the actual Kelvin of what you're shooting. And some circumstances you may be under some weird, weird lights. Sometimes lights from like a Kia or energy saving lights aren't really either tungsten or daylight there somewhere in between, so you can go in and you can actually select the actual amount of temperature that your Kelvin is picking up. I've gone and been places where I can shoot better at like 424,500. It's best to look at your screen on the back. Trust your screen as much as you can. Again, it's the best thing to do is to go out there, shoot, test pulling your computer, check it projected on your TV and test it out because that's really how you're gonna know what camera is the best for what light situation you're doing.
4. Setting White Balance on Your Camera: so to say, your color temperature. It's also called white balance. You want to set your white balance or picking your color temperature toe where you're gonna shoot now? Depends on what camera using their several ways of doing it. Typically, the most auto feature would be finding the white balance your color balance section and selecting priest Set determined uh, settings. There'll be a little bulb for tungsten. They'll be a little sun for daylight. They'll be a little cloud for cloudy. They'll be a little shady for in the shade. They'll be a one for flash, so it all just depends on what camera you're shooting. So the next way you can set your white balance or color temperature is actually going in and selecting the actual Kelvin. Not all cameras will let you do this, but if you find a setting where you can actually switch, what are you doing? 3,233,343,500? You can set the actual number of Kelvin that your camera is taking it. That's a little more precise, and you have to go off a monitor, decide what you want to do and what kind of lights you're using The third way to do it and not all cameras let you do this, but you can actually set the scene that you're in two white balance to a white or gray piece of paper. The best thing to do is find a clean, white piece of paper. Philip, your entire lens with that white piece paper in the lighting you're gonna be shooting in and holding down the white balance button on your camera. All cameras of different. Not all of them are able to do this, but a lot of the more professional cameras you will be able to if you don't have white piece of paper. Sometimes just a white T shirt works or a medium grey or kind of like leveled gray will also work to set your wife.
5. Powering Your Lights: so, depending on what lights you're using, it will depend on the power that you need. Typically, a narrative film or commercial tends to use bigger lights. So if you're using those bigger lights, you'll typically have a gaffer or juicer or people running power for you. You should know that as a cinematography, how much power most lights are going to take. Usually, they're measured in one case to case three K's, which stands for kilowatts. A lot of them, really you got to translate how many kilowatts that amperage is pulled from that most houses and most normal things are 20 or 15 to 20 amps for a Edison Wall socket on one circuit. So you really got to start to learn that and figure out if the lights I'm using can handle on that circuit or that breaker, you really need to check every single Edison plug that you're plugging into. Make sure you know exactly how much amps and voltage you're coming out of there before you take the light that you know you're gonna use and plug it in there. Ah, lot of research should be done also, on what lights they're gonna USA's faras how much power is getting pulling out? This is probably one of the most dangerous things in lighting and cinematography is plugging into power because power will kill you. So you need to do your research, and you need to check and make sure that A your lights can handle the amount of power coming in or the wall in the plugs can handle the amount of power that the light needs to pull. Most homes will just trigger off. Ah, breaker. But you should always know where the breaker isas Well, if, in case you need to get to that, so if you're on set, you using bigger lights. Typically you have a gaffer and a team that's working with you to figure out that Ah, lot of bigger movies will use big lights, which are more tungsten based. They will be up to five K's, which is about 50 amps, or they'll use be doing one case to case, which range from 10 amps to 20 amps. It just depends on what kind of package you haven't what you're shooting now. The L E D lights, the smaller, smaller lines don't pull nearly as much stuff like these Felix lights. Kino lights different smaller led lights or light panels. They tend to really pull very low amount of amperage, typically one AMP two amps, three amps. That's around the big L E D light. These guys only pull about one amp, I believe, and so you can put multiple ones on one circuit, especially if the circuits big enough. The important thing to know is that you understand where the power is coming from, how much you need and how much you have before you max out.
6. Light Stands 101: So what? You're putting your lights on. Typically, you're putting them on stands. Most led lights are gonna come with their own stands a lot like this one, and you can see how we just It's very lightweight. It's got thin legs, and we actually put a sandbag on it, which you want to do. And I want to be safe because people will be walking around set. You never know if they might pull the cord and fall down sandbags or the safest thing to get on your lights. Most led Zehr coming with the's stands if you want a bigger set. If you're on a movie set, you're gonna probably need to research and know exactly what light stands to be putting on your truck or have them bring the stage. There stands raging in every size from the very baby pre most that have baby pins on him, which is the type of pin that works for certain yolks on different lights. Toe big combo stands to steal stands to mambo combos. Teoh. You know, crank evaders. There's a 1,000,000 types of stands again, another thing to research and understand what kind of light you have, what kind of yoke and base. It has to know what kind of stand it's gonna go on. So remember when you figure out what lights were going to use, figure if they come with stands or not, and then figure out if they don't. What kind of stands you need for that pin, typically on bigger lights there either baby pins or their junior pins. This is kind of its own little Ellie deep in, which is kind of a mini pin. But you got to know that thing in order to be able to put these on specific stands that you need so that you can put them in places you need delight, because that's important.
7. Lighting Safety: How to Handle Lights: so handling lights and power is obviously very dangerous. The big thing is that they get hot. There's power the deal with. So the best thing to do whenever you're dealing with lights is to have a set of gloves. I got these at a hardware store, Home Depot and their regular work electrician's gloves, and they will help you. I wouldn't say they would keep you totally safe all the time, but they definitely will keep your hands cool when you're handling a hot light. And also, when you're handling power, they'll give you some protection in case you get shocked or anything like that, but also just great, because you can handle stuff without getting dirty and all that. So the big thing is toe have gloves minor, well worn, and I save you some a lot. There might probably my third pair and being in the film industry, but you've got to remember even L E D lights tend to get a little hot. So at the end of the day, or if you're adjusting them, they tend to get hot around here. And if you have barn doors on a light, these will tend to heat up very quickly, especially on tungsten lights. Handling these with your bare hands after lights been on for a couple hours is not a good idea, so make sure you have gloves. They'll still be warm, but you can handle them also, Some lights have scrim packs, which will be more advanced. Tungsten lights, where they used to cut down the light a little bit that you just drop him there. Those will also be very hot. If you're using led lights and Kino bulbs, chances are they're not gonna be us hot. But it's still a good idea to wear gloves to be safe. The big thing to take away from handling lights is that you need to be careful. We need to be paying attention. If you're gonna unscrew a light, make sure you have gloves. Make sure it's unplugged before you turn it on. Make sure it's plugged in before you turn it on. Just kind of be generally aware of safety and the amount of heat and power that is involved with lights. The bigger the lights are, the bigger the risk is. But remember, even the small lights will have a lot of power and a lot of heat to them, so make sure to just stay safe
8. Intro to Video Lighting: everyone. Welcome to a new section in the cinematography course today. We're talking about lighting techniques and practices. This is an awesome section. This is a cool course, because Will is so professional. And we were actually shooting on a film set. And we got to use all sorts of professional equipment while teaching this course. And so in this section, we're going to be showing you a live demonstration of lighting. And how will light for an interview set up for a romantic sort of comedy scene and then for a darker horror, scary scene. And he's really going to show you how, Just by changing the lights, you can change the entire mood of a scene. So this is going to be a fun section. There's other stuff that we're gonna be talking about with lighting, but enjoy it and I'll pass it over to Will
9. Why Do We Light?: So why do we use lights? We can use lights to tell the story, to create a mood to really kind of just exemplify what we're shooting. We have a lot of composition work, and we're deciding how to expose things. But lights will really show us a different angle in a different way. Teoh express the store and express how we're feeling later in a demo. I'll kind of show you how we can create contrast that creates different looks. Contrast can create a moody, moody look. Or it can make something very menacing and evil and scary. So, really, you can see we're in horror films that use less light. It's more about what you don't like versus a commercial or a car commercial where there's brig bright lights everywhere. So really lighting and lights say a lot about what you're shooting on, what you're trying to say. It's really just another tool in filmmaking and in cinematography to express what your compositions is saying and what your story is saying. Overall, so different lights and different colors will say different things red, maybe passion or anger or anything aggressive blue, maybe cool and calm. Same with like a light green color temperature and how you use the light is really expressing those emotions through through feeling through color. Through brightness. A soft light is much softer. It's nicer and calmer was hard. Light is a little bit more harsher and scarier and and honest. I think back in film Noirs and you'd much harder shadows with lights. So it's just kind of helping exemplify again what you're trying to say and how you're trying to say it.
10. Lighting Demonstration - What can lighting say?: Okay, so we've talked about what exactly lights are and what they are technically and what they're capable of doing. So I'm gonna take you through three different lighting setups. First being an interview, lighting set up. This is the basis for everything. This is going to be a basic interview lighting set up that you should be able to grasp, walk into any interview and be able to set up very quickly. And we'll get you through almost anything to I'm gonna take you through sort of a low romantic, warm narrative sort of setting where it will be kind of narrative e. And it'll be like a nice, like, just natural place in, like, an evening sort of room. And then three, I'm gonna put you in like a very scary dark contrast, moody kind of feeling light. So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna have Phil coming here in a second. I'm gonna have him sit down. I'm going to explain the situation. Light him up. You're gonna see me kind of running around doing like I'll stop. I'll explain what I did show you the different lights and then we'll do the next one and do the next one. So the first thing I would do is I would come in here and I would look at this room and I'll always set the white balance to what we're gonna dio. I'm gonna use tungsten balance in here. Probably gonna turn off these gross fluorescent lights that you can see right now and, uh, just figure out what to do next. So, first, we're going to set up the lights, You'll see me go dark, and then you'll see me started. Turn lights on. In our little time lapse. We'll just go from there. So you ready? Fell? I think so. This is what I would use for a three point lighting system. A basic interview here on Phil. Now, I do have one little light back there, So technically is four lights, But you can kind of see the difference between what this room used to be like and what this room looks like now. So I just want to run with you really quick with what I did. So what I did here was I might have my assistant over here. Turn off this light. This is a fill light that Get it feel like f I l l So if you just push the button to turn it off, you can see that all it really is is just filling in the shadows here from our key light, I started with the key light. So let's turn this one off so you can see this is gonna be really where our main light is coming from. And this is what we call the key light. So turn the key light on So he's lit, right? But now you can see over here on Phil's right side, it's a little shady, and it's a little more menacing than we want it to be. So we're gonna do is turn on our fill light our Phil itis filling in for Phil the shade on this side. So it's a little more even typically at that light is usually half a stop to a stop to two stops less than the stops coming from this light. So we got our key. We got her fill. Now let's look at the back light. You could see my shadow in it right now, and you can see the light itself in the wide shot here, but in our normal shot. Let's turn it off and on. Here's off on off on and you can see how it's giving him just a little bit of an edge when it's on and it's it's separating it from the background. So keep it on and off, on and off, on and off. And you see the really difference the thing I like about the back lights and said it's able to separate them from the background, depending on what your background is. And it just adds a nice little dynamic pop to the subject. You can see. I did add one light over here, and I can unplug it and plug it in. It's more of an accent, like for the background, because we're shooting in such a crappy background, but you can see if I take it out. It's just plain back there, and it's just blank in shadowy by adding this as a little bit more dimension with that kind of accent light. So it's nice to kind of have more than three lights, but you can get away with just three lights if you need them. You never know what situation you're in in an interview. Okay, So let's move on to a little bit more romantic, warm, nice kind of movie lighting. So here we have a more warmer, natural kind of movie lighting. Here we got going on, Phil. It's a little bit different than the interview lighting, although not totally, dramatically different. What I do is I move the key light around over to here. So now you have this nice key light coming from the side. I dimmed it down a little bit, cause our lights that we have are dimmable. I then took our fill light and actually pointed it down in front of Phil. So it's bouncing a little bit off the Offiah floor there, and I lowered the intensity. So it's not as intense, you can see is a little bit of shadow and sound in center of his face. And then I took our backlight and I moved it over here, and I'm actually bouncing off the wall here, which is a little white. There's a white door, and I'm bouncing the light off the wall. Remember, I talked about earlier. Lights can either be shot directly at or they could be bounced or they could be diffused. This one is actually able to bounce, and it kind of the nice, nice bounce I didn't mention any that are key lights and fill lights are diffused with our soft boxes that I talked about before, which kind of makes a softer light. I then adjusted the backlight. Here you can see not a backlight but the accent light in the back to kind of close down. And I lowered the intensity and I changed the color temperature just a little bit because I can, and that makes it look a little bit more interesting. The key here is that we make this look like a nice, warm natural scene, like he's in the evening at some room. He's just hanging out as opposed to full blown lit interview. It's not accident memory thing. It's just a natural, nice looking shot based on what this ugly room used to look like. So let's move on to something a little bit more dramatic. I'm going to light fill as if he's about to murder somebody. Basically, I want to make him look really menacing. Dark horror, scary. I'm gonna try a couple different things out. You can see that this narrative stuff takes me a little bit longer. The light than the interview. The interview stuffs. Very cookie cutter, very key, light filled light, backlight. Where is this stuff? I kinda have to play around, and it really is dependent on the structure in the place you're at. So here we go. Okay, So here's my menacing Phil look. So really, we got some mawr contrast. More scary, a little more dynamic, as's faras contrast really more than anything. So I took the key and it's over here now. There's no Phil over here. I mean, there's Phil, but there's no philae over here, so you can see that there's just a dark dice, dark shape on the right side. I added a really intense back light. You can see if I block it what it's doing, seeing the wide shot of us that I'm talking to. You can kind of see it down here below right here. Um, and in the closer shot, it's really just covering and putting a ring around Phil's head right here. As I move my hands through, you kind of probably see what it's doing. The big thing about that is I like the ring that it pops him out from the dark background. It's a little more scary. This is a little more contrast. You can see the contrast affects the SMU to him just being scary and upset like he's about to murder somebody and you can see the effect right here. If I take our key ally and I just dim it down and down and up, you can totally see what it's doing. So this is nothing. And then you can see that the backlight is just taking air of everything a little more dark . You can even see the detail on his face as much. But as I pulled this up and start to dim up, you can see the different attitude of it. This is really bright. This is probably about where I had it, so it's a little more menacing. A little more contrast. E Alternatively, I did set up a different light you may have seen in the time lapse. We turn this down, pan it off, and I turn on my lower front light. Also another way to look a little bit more, many more scary. It's like having that flashlight at dinner. We only see like the head. And if we turned off the back light, you can see always see. Is Phil just right there in its face and kind of intense? Also, another way to look a little bit more, many more scary. It's like having that flashlight at dinner. We only see, like the head. And if we turned off the back light, you can see always see. Is Phil just right there in his face and kind of intense? So those are just some really quick examples of how we can change light and use light to affect the scene that we're doing. Using the tools that we have here. There is infinite ways to light a scene, and depending on what you're trying to say and what you're doing or what your composition is, there's a 1,000,000 different ways. Those to me are some very structurally based ways toe light things, and if you kind of use that as like your template or a way to start to look at things, you really need to develop your own style, how delight and what you can dio to really use the tools that you have to make your story come alive
11. Making Eyes Pop with Lighting: so one thing to really mention very quickly. When you're doing an interview light and you have your key light set up, you can notice a little glimmer and fills I That's called an I light. So it's really nice sometimes to bring contrast of someone's eyes, and it's really pretty looking and aesthetically pleasing. So it's nice when you use your key. Light is a nice soft sores that will naturally happen in different spots. You can kind of see and watch movies. Actresses and actors have highlights in there all the time, and a lot of DP's of cinematographers tend to try and achieve that in close ups and in medium shots.
12. Tips for Shooting with Natural Light: So we're outside. I wanted to give you a couple tips for natural light. Now we got really, really lucky. This is my favorite type of light to shoot video, and you can see it's an overcast day. It's totally, even light. It's about midday right now, probably late afternoon, and you can see it's just totally flat now. If we had the Sunda battle with, I'd be a little different if you wanted to add a little bit more light in. The best thing to do is to bring a bounce card or a bounce flexible. This is a flex bill. I would typically use more of a white bounce card. This is what we got right now so you can see how you can bounce in all this light on me. You see off on off on, uh, on and you can see that there's a ton more light with the bounce and adds a little bit of glow. It kind of depends on your style. There's also this gold side, which I refuse to use, but I'll show you what it looks like. It's a little warmer, a little cleaner. This is tend to use actually more on models and stuff like that for photography. More so than video, The best thing to do would be using a white card, a white car to be much more clean and solid, especially via bright, bright sunlight that will add the most. The big thing about shooting outside is trying to be in the shade and having this nice, even light again. We got really lucky. It's Ah, it's It's definitely overcast. And so it looks nice. This would be a nice scene. I may bring in like a daylight to come out here. If I had a generator on a bigger shoot, I'd bring in H M I or something big to kind of accent the light and make it look a little more dynamic. So we're not in total sunlight here. If we were in sunlight, which I can't show you, there's several things you can do. First, get out of the sun. Second, if you have some sort of diffusion like typically you get a big giant muslin or a rag. If you're on a big set that you can have the grip set up, it could be a 12 by 12 foot Muz that you can set up to cover your actors will be 20 feet by 20 feet. You want to try and get them out of the sun as much as possible. If you can't. If there's no way of you doing that, you want to try and back like them by the sun. That will give him a nice room light, and then you can bounce something in front of them, whether it be a foam core or a white car or something to just fill in that shade. The big thing is to kind of have the sun behind them, and maybe you can add in that flare might look pretty, and so also, the actors aren't looking into the sun. They'll tend to squint, and that will just look bad. So the big thing is, get him out of the sun, get him in the shade and if you can't do that, put the sun behind them
13. Should You Diffuse or Dim Your Video Lights?: A student asked, Why
would we diffuse light rather than just use a
dimmer to dim the light? The short answer is that diffusing the light
makes it softer. It makes the contrast between the highlights and the
shadows of your image, not as contrast deep. To show you this in practice, I've set up a situation where I have an LED panel I'm
sitting in front of. Right now. You can see it with 100% power with no diffusion. It's pretty harsh, right? It's too bright,
it's overexposed. So what do we do? We can drop down with
the dimmer to 50% power. This is a 500 watt
equivalent light, Still a little bright. So let's drop it down even
more so now the side of my face that is
exposed properly, on the left side of my face. Looks good, but there's
a ton of contrast, a ton of shadows you can
see in my note on my nose, on the side of my face, and this is at 15% power. The background also
gets super dark, which is not necessarily
a bad thing. This is perhaps a style
that you're going for. This light is very focused
and directed on the subject. On me. It's not soft, light. Hard light. Let's go ahead and
add some diffusion. My drake has lights have these little plastic
diffusion filters. So to start out with, I added that and that cuts
down the light a bit. You can see that
at a 100% power, it's still overexposed,
but closer to exposure. I'm going to add
this soft box on top of that diffusion as well. So combining them, this is going to cut the light
down quite a bit. And you can see that with both the diffusion
filter and the softbox, I'm exposed properly in
the Light is a lot softer. We're going to see
a side-by-side comparison in just a second. It is a little dark though. So I'm going to go
ahead and take out that diffusion filters so you can see what just the
softbox looks like. And this is with 100% power. Remember with 100% power
without the softbox, it was so bright. It was so contrast is
so bright and too hard. For this first side-by-side, I'm comparing the 50%
power without diffusion to 100% with diffusion because it has a similar overall exposure. If I pause it here, you can see that with the diffusion it
spreads out the light. So the background gets a
little bit more light. And that could be a good thing, that could be a bad thing. Maybe you want your life focus with your subject and the background to be
a little bit darker. And so this video isn't
supposed to tell you. You have to use soft
diffused light. There's a time and place
for each type of light. But as you can see, the light is spread
a little bit more evenly with the diffusion
card on the right-hand side, the shadow isn't as dark
and we're gonna punch in here just a little bit so you
can see even more details. But that light, those shadows
are a little bit brighter and it's not as contrasted
with the diffusion. Now let's see what it looks
like with the softbox. So here you can see that
the light is even softer with just the softbox
compared to the no diffusion. Overall on my face. The light is softer. My entire face is more exposed. It's still a little bit dark. I would probably
play around with the position of the
light if I wanted to make sure that the
shadows weren't as harsh on the side of my nose, like it is on the left side of the screen with no diffusion. Here's the same setup
with just the softbox, not the diffusion card. And if we pause it here, you can see that the shadows
and the contrast from the bright to the darks is
higher with no diffusion. Then on with the softbox. And don't just pay attention to the shadows because the shadows still are dark in both
of these video clips. But notice the highlights, the contrast, that's what
we're talking about. The bright side of my face
with no diffusion is a lot brighter than the
one with the softbox. Overall, the softbox
spreads out that light and everything gets
a little bit more even. So one more wide look
with the two shots. Notice the background, notice
the contrast of the light, the shadows versus
the highlights. And that's what you get. By adding diffusion. Again, it doesn't mean you can't use just dimming
your light to get proper exposure or
changing the settings on your camera to get
proper exposure. Hopefully, this
helps you understand what diffusing light does. Alright, thanks so much for watching and we'll see
you in another video. Thanks for the question.
14. The Course Project: Hey, everyone, welcome to another challenge. I hope you've enjoyed the section on lighting techniques. Your challenge today is to go out and practice a three point lining set up even if you don't have a nice film lighting kit, you can just find lights or light sources available to you to create a three point lining set up. You can use a big window, which I'm using right now to be your key light. You can find a desk lamp or something else to be the fill light or the backlight, so we just want you to practice three point lining set up because this is your go to lighting set up whether you're shooting an interview. If you're shooting a talking head video like this, if you're shooting a commercial narrative, any sort of scene where you're lighting the three point lining system is your go to lighting set up, and it's important to really understand how it works so that you can jump in there set of your lights and you have to worry about how my going to like this scene. So the challenges do a three point lighting system. Take a picture if you can or a screenshot of the video and posted to the course and so that we can check it out. So have fun. Let us know if you have any questions. The rise Ball Syria in the next section.
Phil Ebiner, Video | Photo | Design
