Lighting 101: How to Light Your Videos

1. Introduction: In this course, I'm talking all about lighting because lighting is arguably the most important parts of any video production, whether you're shooting Hollywood level films, or YouTube videos, or anything in between, it really important that you have great lighting in order to have great videos. Hi, my name is Chris, and I'm a full-time filmmaker and photographer from England, and videos and lighting videos is what I do for a living. In this course, let me run you through some of the really important information when it comes to lighting. We're going to begin by talking about throwing lights versus shaping light. Then we're going to talk about natural lights and how to control natural lights. Then we'll get into soft lights and hot lights, three-point lighting, two-point lighting using a really awesome lighting technique to get a really cinematic look. Then we'll talk about lighting with one light, RGB or color lighting, using practical lighting. Then we'll jump into a few case studies. I'll talk a little bit about the equipment that I'm using throughout this course. Then we'll finish off with a nice ultra. If you're shooting a video soon and you want to improve the quality of your footage, you want it to look visually pleasing, then you're in the right place. In this course, I'm going to talk all about video lighting. Let's get into it. 2. Make Sure You Have Enough Light: When it comes to lighting videos, there are two things that you need to take into account. First of all, the camera needs enough light and second of all we want to shape that light to create character. Let's talk about that first one in this episode. All cameras, regardless of whether it's a digital SLR, a mirrorless camera, an iPhone, or a big Hollywood level camera, like a red or an RA, they all need a certain amount of light in the scene to get great looking footage. Because the problem is if you're filming in a dark environment and is not enough lights in the scene, then you'll get this noisy footage. These noisy footage is basically the process of you having to pull up the ISO in the camera, and this is going to produce some really ugly footage. Before we even talk about shaping light and doing all of this fancy stuff, we first just need to make sure that there is enough light within the scene. If you don't have access to lighting, then that means I would recommend filming outside during the day when there's daylight. So take full advantage of the big lights in the sky, the sun. Or if you're filming inside, then try and take advantage of that daylight again and place somebody next to a window when you're filming rather than placing them in a dark room. Alternatively, if you're filming in an inside location then make sure that there is enough lights within the room to get a good quality image out of your camera. That's the first battle. Make sure you're filming somewhere where you've got plenty of light hitting the camera sensor. Don't film in a dark alleyway in the middle of the night, or don't film in a really dark conference hall with no lighting. It's really important that you get enough light into the camera sensor. That is lesson 1. 3. Controlling Natural Light (Filming Outside): When it comes to lighting your videos, you would probably imagine that filming outside where you don't need any external lights would make life a little bit easier for you. Unfortunately, filming outside, especially on a bright sunny day, comes with multiple different complications. There's a few things that you need to know in order to get the best possible footage when you're filming outside. Now don't get me wrong, you can capture a really great video when you're filming outside in the sunlight but there are a few complications that you need to be aware of. If it's a sunny day, this can get very difficult because you would think sunlight's on the face is fine. But the problem is, this can cause squinting, it can cause harsh unflattering shadows, and it's not particularly a professional look. There's a few things that you want to do to avoid this. First of all, you could just film on a slightly cloudy day. Filming when the sun is behind the clouds will give you a softer, much more complementing, flattering light. However, if you want that sunny look, then it's really important that you turn your subject away from the sun. Use the sun as a back light rather than a light on the face. Because like I mentioned, that harsh direct sunlight can be really difficult to control. The easiest way is to just turn your person around so that the sun is on the back of them, rather than directly in front of their face. The problem is though, when you're filming in the middle of the day and the sun is directly above you, this can be a little bit difficult to control because the light is directly coming down, you can't turn around because you always going to get that shadow. You'll get really harsh shadows under your eyes, you'll get harsh shadow under your nose, and your lip, and it doesn't look particularly great. This is why we need to control the lights and the first way is to soften the sun. Essentially to soften the sunlight's, we need some diffusion. Diffusion is basically just a soft sheets that allows the light to pass through. This sheet, for example, is a diffusion sheets, and as you can see, it's just the soft plastic like material that is really good a softening lights. All you would need to do is grab something like this. Or you could get a pop-up diffusion sheet from Amazon. If you search a 5 in 1 reflector kit, you'll probably find that there for about £20 or $20. All you have to do that is just hold this directly above the person so that that sunlight is now nice and soft. You'll notice you get a much softer light. This will one, give you much more flattering results, but it will also make it a bit easier for the person to be looking, and perform, and do what they need to do. Because the problem is when the sun is glaring in your eyes, the first thing you want to do is close your eyes or alternatively put the sunglasses on. Softening off the harsh lights makes it more comfortable for the performer, but it also gives you a nicer light. Alternatively though, if you didn't want that soft look and you did want a dramatic look, then rather than having the harsh shadows, you could fill those in with more lights. I'm not talking about adding another light into the scene, because you can't compete with the sun, I'm talking about adding in some bounce. We're taking that sunlight and we're bouncing it back onto the face. If the sun is angled up here, you would want to bounce the light, so you'd have a bounce underneath the person to bounce back up into the shadows. Now if you did purchase a 5 in 1 diffusion reflector kits, then you'll get your reflector sheets with the diffusion. Essentially this is just a big silver, gold or white circle or a white square that it's just going to reflect the light backup onto the person's face. Now, if you use the white reflector, the gold reflector, or the silver reflector, these will give you slightly different looks, but they will all help to fill in those shadows. Now this is really great when you're doing close up work. But the problem is the moment you have to go out to a wide, this can be very difficult because you need larger bounces or you need larger diffusion. Typically, when you see a behind the scenes picture or a video of a Hollywood production, you'll see these massive stands with this massive white sheets. This is just a large diffusion, or you get people holding large bounce cards, or you see this large white polystyrene board to bounce the light back on to the person's face. These are all intended to control that sunlight. You can see how complicated and how expensive it can get to control that sunlight's when you're outside if you need larger, wider shots. My general advice to you is film on a cloudy day if you can't, especially if you're filming people. If not, then either angled them away from the sun so the sun is behind them, or use bounce or diffusion to soften that light or bounce lights back on to their face. But try and limit this to close ups or tighter medium shots. Because the second you get into wide shots, it's going to be too difficult to control the sun in an entire shot. Of course, you can still take advantage of natural lights if you're filming inside, just place the person you're filming next to a window, and then film them with that natural light coming in and hitting their face. Because you're inside a building, you won't have to worry so much about bouncing or diffusing the light. Now, if you wanted to film inside and you were filming in a room which was a little bit darker or it didn't have a large window, then this is when we would need to introduce a video lighting. In the next episode, I'm going to talk about video lighting, and the difference between hard and soft lighting. 4. Soft Lights VS Hard Lights: If you've decided not to take advantage of natural daylight, and you would rather use video lighting to light your scene, then it's really important that we're aware of these two different types of lights, we've got hard light and we've got soft light. Essentially hard light and soft light are two different types of lighting that are going to give you two very different results. Essentially, a hard light is going to give really harsh shadows and a soft light is going to give really smooth even looks. Now depending on the type of content that you're filming, you may want to lean into a hard light or you may want to lean into a soft light source. This is completely up to you and your creative decisions. However, let me just run you through the benefits of both and what the difference is between these two. First of all, let's start with hard light. A hard light is exactly what it sounds like. It hasn't been softened up. The light source is very harsh and drastic. The real life example of this is the sun on a sunny day. If you're filming outside and there's no clouds in the sky, you're going to get really harsh, really dramatic shadows on the person's face that you're filming. However, if you were to film them on a cloudy day, you've got the clouds in between yourself and the sun, that is acting as a layer of diffusion and that is helping to soften up the light. This is an example of a soft light. In video lighting terms, a hard light is a light without diffusion, and a soft light is a light with diffusion. Diffusion can be anything from a big softbox, it could be a big white piece of fabric, it could just be a white t-shirt. It's essentially just a white piece of fabric in front of the light to help to soften up the light. Now, like I previously mentioned, hard lighting is really good at creating dramatic shadows. That means if you're going for a really dramatic look, then using hard lighting can be a great way of achieving that look. But if you're filming people, then generally you want to go for a soft light. Soft light produces really complementary lighting. In this example, where I'm talking to you now, I'm using a softbox and that is giving me really nice soft lighting on my face. If I was to take the softbox off, I would get really dramatic, harsh lighting and it wouldn't be as flattering. Generally, harsh lighting or hard lighting will show more imperfections on the skin, so you will see more wrinkles, you'll see any blemishes, spots, marks, anything on the face, which is a slight imperfection, will come up because that will be a shadow created around that. However, once you soften up that light with a layer of diffusion, that will smooth everything out and you'll get a really nice complementary look. Generally, when I'm filming people, I like to stick to soft lighting and then I use hard lighting in the background to create shapes and textures in the background. Of course, this is completely your decision. You feel free to pick the lighting that you want. But generally, nine times out of 10, I would lean in towards soft lighting rather than hard lighting. 5. Three Point Lighting: The first lighting setup that you're going to want to consider using in your video productions is three-point lighting. Three-point lighting is exactly what it sounds like. It's a lighting setup consisting of three lights. Now, three-point lighting is probably the most used lighting setup in video production because it gives you a really nice, smooth, solid, clean look. Three-point lighting won't give you a dramatic look, it will just give you a pleasant looking video. Three-point lighting consists of your three lights. You've got two behind the camera in front of the person and you've got one behind the person, which is shining back on the hair. Let's start with our first light. Our first light is our key light and this is one big light just on the side of the camera. Your key light is going to give you the most amount of light onto the face. Then opposite the key light, we've got a fill light. This is another light just on the other side of the camera. This fill light is lighting the other side of the face and it's filling in any shadows that that key light might have created. If the key light is making this side of the face dark, then your fill light will fill in all of those shadows. At this point you've got a really nice flattering light on the front of the face. Now at the moment, this does look good, but the person is blending in with the background. If we turn on a backlight, which is a light positioned behind the subject, and we angle that towards the back of their head, you can see we get a really nice hair light. Now the purpose of this hair light or this backlight is to help the subject stand out from the background. Now you can break this rule, but generally you want to put your backlight on the opposite side to your key light. If your key light is here on this side, you want to put your backlight over there. Then if your key light is on this side, you want to put your backlight back there. Three-point lighting consists of three lights; key, fill, back. Now, these can all be completely different types of lighting if you wanted to. Generally, when I'm filming people, I like to have my key and my fill as soft lights, so these will be softboxes and then my backlight, I generally have a hard light. I just have a light without any diffusion just to get that really dramatic hair light wrapping around the back of the head or just around the hairline. Now three-point lighting is going to give you really smooth, really consistent, strong, beautiful lighting. Three-point lighting is great if you're filming anything into camera, so something like this would be great with three-point lighting. If you were filming an interview based video, then three-point lighting again, would be great in that example, or if you were filming anybody and you were trying to get that really nice, smooth look, then three-point is a great way to go. Three-point is generally the first setup that you want to approach. Once you get comfortable with that three-point lighting setup, you can start to remove light or play around with the positioning of your lighting. That was three-point lighting. In the next episode, I'm talking all about two-point lighting, so we're taking one light away from the three-point lighting setup. 6. Two Point Lighting: In this episode, we're talking all about two-point lighting. Now, two-point lighting is following the same structure as three-point lighting, except we're going to take the fill light out of the scene. Now instead of key, fill, and back, we have key and back. We've got one light in front of the person and one light behind the person. Now, this style of lighting can create really dramatic results, especially when you play with the position of your key lights. Again, it's completely up to you whether you have a soft or hard key light or back light. But generally, I like to have a soft key and a hard back light. Now when you're shooting a two-point lighting setup, it's really important that you think about the position of your key lights and your back lights in retrospect to one another. You always want these to be on opposite sides of the person. If I was talking to you straight into camera, and my key light was on the one side of me, I would want my back light on the other side of me. If one was on the right of the camera, the other one would be on the left of the camera. You're creating this nice diagonal line. The problem is if one was on the right and the other one was also on the right, then you get a really dark side of the face, and you lose definition a little bit. Yes, moody lighting is really powerful, but it's really nice to balance the key and the back light by having them crossing over from one another. One's on the right, one is on the left. Now talking about moody lighting, we can actually use our two-point lighting setup to create a slightly moodier or more dramatic look. If I was filming an interview, for example, and I was looking just off to the camera, rather than sticking the key lights on the side of the face which is towards the camera, I would put the key lights on the opposite side and light the side which is away from the camera. Essentially, this is making the side of the face closer to the camera a little bit darker. Then, of course, you put your back light on the opposite side to the key lights. That will give you a really nice cinematic look. If you look at most TV series or films which are a bit more dramatic and a bit darker, then you'll notice this two-point lighting setup being used everywhere. This is a really dramatic look, and it can really help to add a layer of drama into your footage. If you were creating an interview-based video-based all about something a little bit darker or something which leans more into the drama genre, then using this two-point lighting setup with the light on the opposite side of the face will give you a really nice dramatic look. Of course, you don't have to do this. You could just put the lights next to the camera shining on the side of the face which is facing towards the camera, and that will still give you a really nice look. Have a play with this two-point lighting setup and see what results you can capture. But there you go. That is your two-point lighting setup. 7. Lighting with One Light: Now, we've talked about a three-point lighting setup and a two-point lighting setup. Let's talk about a one-light setup. Even if you only have one video light, it's still possible to get a really nice and dramatic video lighting setup. Of course, you're not going to be able to shape the lights as much as you would like to with two or three-point lighting setup, but one light can actually go a very long way. Generally, I would like to soften up this one light to make this a little bit more complimentary and to help this to go a little bit further. If I were using a harsh video light and I was to hold this at the side of my face, it would create a really harsh dramatic look. But if I was to soften this up and add a softbox to this, then the light would wrap around the face a little bit more, and would help to give a really nice look. Generally, if you've only got one lights, I would put a softbox on that and I would want to put that roughly 45 degrees away from the camera. This is 0, this is 90. I would want to put this roughly 90 degrees so about here, just to give a nice light on the side of the face and with that softbox, you get a really nice fall off with that light. Of course, if you wanted to, you can lean into some more dramatic lighting and you can pull this to the side to get a really dramatic look, or you could mount the light directly above to get a really dramatic intense look. However, if you're going for a YouTube video or an interview, then generally I would like to put this at the one side of that 45 degree angle to get a nice soft light. Now, because you've only got the one light and that is up front. This means you won't have a backlight to help your subjects stand out from the background. It's also really important as well that you add a little bit of distance between your subject and your background so that they don't blend in. Awesome to step forward maybe a meter or two, and then make sure that the color of the background is different to the color of the clothes that the person is wearing. If they're against a black wall, then make sure they're not wearing a black t-shirt because they'll just blend into the background and you'll only be able to see their face, which would just look a little bit silly. If they're wearing something a little bit brighter, like an orange or yellow or white t-shirt, for example, against that black background, then that's really going to help them to stand out against the background and not blend in. Of course, though, if you wanted to, you can lean into that dramatic look and you can go for a more intense look and have the light at the side, the light on top, or you can play around with moving the light potentially to create a really dramatic look. But one-point lighting is an option you just have to be a little bit more intelligent about the positioning of your subjects and where they are in the space. 8. White Balance: In the next episode, I'm going to talk about RGB lighting or colored lighting. But before we get on into our reds, greens, and blues, we need to talk about tungsten and daylights. Tungsten and daylights are different color temperatures of lights. A tungsten light is represented by the number 3,200 Kelvins. The tungsten lights is more of an orange light, whereas 5,500 or daylight is more of a white light. Now most video lights these days have the option of flicking between 3,200 and 5,500 Kelvins. It's really important that you're paying close attention to the temperature of the room, the temperature of the lights, and the setting in camera. Let's talk a little bit about white balance and how all of this works. The white balance is a setting inside of your camera which allows you to change the color temperature of your light. If you're filming outside where there's a cooler light or a whiter light, you would want to set the white balance in your camera to 5,500 Kelvins or daylight mode. This will give you true color. Essentially, if you were outside and you chose 3,200 in your camera, you would end up with a really blue image. This is because you have set the wrong white balance. You want to match the color of the light in the scene to the setting on the camera. Then on the other side of that, if you're inside in a room and they had warmer lighting, so that had tungsten light bulbs and you set your white balance to 5,500 or daylight, then you would have a really orange-looking video. It's important that you set that to 3,200. It's really important that you're matching the settings of the white balance in the camera to the color temperature of the lights in the scene. Now, if you're filming outside, this is nice and easy. Just keep this to 5,500 or daylight and you'll match the color of the sun. But if you're inside and you are using video lights, then it's really important that you have a look, see what's in the space, and try match your lighting to get that nice, consistent look in the color. Let me give you a quick case study. If I was filming in a room in the middle of the day and there was a big window and there was loads of daylight spilling in but I had one other light to add a little bit of extra light into the scene, I would want to match the color of the light to the color of the light coming in from outside. Because it would be daylight coming into the room, it's really important in this example that we set our video light to daylight or 5,500 Kelvins. You see, the problem is if we were to have daylight coming in and I set the video light to 3,200 and had that warmer color, we would get this clash of colors. One side of me would be white, the other side would be a bit warmer and a bit closer to orange. This means when I film this and put this back into the computer, the video footage would look a little bit weird. If you're trying to get a nice consistent look with your footage on your lighting, then it's important that you're matching the color of the light. Alternatively though, if you're filming a dark location and you're bringing in a whole three-point lighting setup, then just setting the same white balance and all of these lights will give you a really nice balanced look. However, you can't actually break this rule and create contrast in your videos by mixing up the white balance of the lights. Generally in this example, if I was doing a three-point lighting setup, I would set the two video lights in the front to one white balance and then that backlight, the one behind would be a different color. Maybe I would set the key lights and the fill lights to 3,200 Kelvin, then I would set the white balance in camera to 3,200 Kelvin, and then my backlight, I would set to 5,500 Kelvins. That means my backlight would look quite blue and it would give me a really nice dramatic color contrast within the frame. Alternatively, I could do the opposite. I could set the video lights in the fronts of the key and the fill to 55, set the camera to 55, and then I would set the backlight to a warmer light of a 32 and that backlight would be really orange. You can be really creative when it comes to color balancing and white balancing the lights in your frame, but just being aware of what the white balance of your camera is and what the white balance of the lights in the scene are doing, is really going to help you to grow the image that you're looking for. 9. Working with Colour (RGB Lighting): In this episode, I'm talking all about color and colored lighting. Not when it comes to lighting, we typically think about how we light somebody and how we can use white lights or orange light to create a really nice complementary look. But when you introduce color into your lighting design, it can really help to convey a specific feeling or emotion. It can really help to increase brand awareness, and it can really help to add character into the shot. But how do we introduce color into our lighting in a stylistic way? Well, first of all, we need to actually have access to colored lighting. Now, the first way is to get a video light, which has the ability to use color. For example, this is the Yongnuo YN360 and this light gives you the option to have any color lights that you like, and you can see I'm using these in the back of the shot to add character into the scene. But if you don't have an RGB video like this, and you only have a normal video light, then how can you convert that into a color light? Well, that's where we have access to colored gels. These are basically just plastic sheets that are set to a specific color. For example, this blue gel would turn our normal white light into a blue light. Let me show you an example. This light here we're going to set to daylight. So this is set to 5500, so we've got a nice daylight white coming through. But when we put this blue gel over it, we're going to get this nice soft blue lighting. As you can see if I turn this backwards, then it's lighting the space behind there. Of course, it doesn't just work for these specific lights if you've got a light like a Godox SL60W for example, or a big video light, then these gels will work on those perfectly. You just clip them on to the lights and you've got a great color light. So now that we have access to color it in our lighting, why would we actually want to use color? Well, first of all, color helps to really convey a specific emotion or a tone. So maybe you are creating a video which is around love. Well, maybe you can lean into reds or maybe you can lean into those warmer color tones. You can use reds, pinks, and purples. Or alternatively, it could just be as simple as your brand colors, blue and yellow. Well, in that case, you could put a nice blue light in the background and have a nice yellow accent light and that will really help to tie in your brand awareness into the video. You can see in my example in this shot, I'm using purple lighting and if you look at all my videos throughout the past year or so, you'll find they've all got the same purple lighting. So I'm creating brand awareness with the color in these videos and then of course as well, you could just use colored lighting because it looks good. You don't always have to have a specific reason why you use color in your video. You can sometimes just use it because it adds a little bit more to the shot. So generally when it comes to using color in your video, you're either going to want to stick towards a specific color palette. So you're going to go in towards the reds, blues, purples, or you can go in towards the yellows, greens and oranges or alternatively, we can play with the color wheel and we can use two opposing colors to create a really nice color contrast. So if you look on the color wheel, for example, if you pick one color and go across from that, you've got two colors that will complement each other really nicely. So for example, you've got the yellow and purple, green and red, blue and orange. When you put these two lights together in the same shot, they create a really nice dynamic look in your scene. Now of course, there is a lot more that goes into choosing specific colors and playing with the color wheel in lighting your scene with specific colors. But this video is basically just here to tell you that you can use colored lighting in your video to help to convey specific tone. You can use it to increase your brand awareness or you could just do it because it looks really cool in the back of the shots. So you can go really creative with your color lighting and make the whole scene one or two different colors. So you can light the person in one color. You can light the background in a different color and then you can maybe add a backlight in an even different color to create a really nice dramatic music video setup or you could do something a bit more subtle in this example and have white light to light the person and then you have color in the background to bring in brand awareness. So regardless of whether you are going really dramatic and going down the music video creative roots, or you're just adding a little bit of color and a little bit of character into the back of your shots. Color can really go a long way when you're lighting your videos. So when you're shooting your next video, don't just think about white and orange lighting. Think about how you can use RGB video lights and RGB filters to create some really nice dramatic looks in your footage. In the next few episodes of this course, I'm going to be doing a few different case studies and I'm going to show you how I would light a scene if this was a client video shoot and I would show you what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and I'll also incorporate some color lighting and show you how I can integrate that within a real-life video scene. 10. Using Practical Lighting: In this episode, we're talking all about practical light sources or practicals for shot. A practical light is a light that lives in the scene. A practical can be anything which is emitting a light source that lives within the scene. This could be a lamp, it could be a TV, it could be a strip light, it could be some light prop in the background. It doesn't have to be anything specific. A practical is something that lives in the scene, is a part of the scene, but is casting light into the scene. In this example, there are a few different practicals which I'm using to add character and light into the scene. The first and the most obvious one are these four video lights, these four strip lights on the wall. I'm using these as practical lights because I think they look cool and adding this purple wash into the video is helping to add character. But of course, if you look beyond that, if you look over this shoulder, you can see I've got this yellow small video light, which is just in the background. This is another example of a practical. Then I've also got some strip lights on the back of this unit, which are helping to add this nice purple glow behind the unit, and that would also be another practical. You could probably argue as well that the iPad with my logo on is also another practical. The reason why we use a practical is, one, to add a little bit more life into the scene. A practical can just help to add another layer into the shot, but it can also help to motivate lighting. If we were looking at a shot and there were no lights in the back of the shot, but we had really dramatic orange warm lighting coming in from the side, we would probably wonder what was causing that. But if we were to put a lamp in the scene and we added that same lighting in, you can really see where the light is coming from, and it's really helping to give the shot some depth and context. Generally, that is why I like to use practical lighting because it gives a reason for the lighting. It's giving the lighting that specific purpose. When I'm filming music videos or I'm filming something a little bit more creative, I try my very best to use practicals within every scene because it's going to give me that motivation to light the scene in a specific way. Maybe somebody is just sitting in front of their computer typing, you could use that computer as the motivator. You could add in another light behind the computer to add a little bit more light into the scene, and now this light doesn't feel out to place, it feels connected. Practical lighting is a really easy way of adding extra character, extra light, and extra flavor into your scene without worrying about having to hide specific lights. You can basically add a practical into a scene and it will help to give your shot more depth and add more character. Don't think about getting rid of everything. Try and bring some practicals into your shot the next time you're filming a video and see how you can use those practicals to help to improve your shot. 11. Case Study #1: In this parts of the course, I'm going to give you a real life case study of how I turn this room into a YouTube setup. For reference, this is my living rooms/kitchen in my apartment. You can see my toaster is in the back. This is my sofa, this is my editing desk. There's nothing in here which you wouldn't find in a normal apartment. There's no fancy video lighting or any of that stuff. I'm just bringing in my video lights and we're building this from the ground up. First of all, this light which is lighting me, is my key light. But let's turn that off and I'll show you where we're starting from. This is the starting point. This is the lighting in my apartment. It's slightly dark I'm aware. But this is the natural light that I would use in the location. My first step would be to turn off the practical lights within the scenes. This is just one ceiling light in the kitchen and then a dim one just in front of me. I'm going to turn those off and then I'm going to turn on my softbox, which is my first light. This is the key light. As you can see, our first video lights is now on. This is the Godox SL60W with a softbox attached to it. It's at around 60 percent here. As you can see because it's on the side of the camera, I'm getting a nice shadow here. But in this example, we'll start with a three-point lighting setup and then figure out what we want to do from there. I'm going to turn on my second light, which is on this side of the camera. There you go, my second video light is now on so I've got one up here and then I've got one here. As you can see, those shadows have been filled in from this light. I've got my key and my fill light, but there's no other lights in the scene. I'm going to turn on one more light back here to complete the three light setup and that is my backlight. As you can see, I've now turned on that backlight, which means we now have three lights in the scene. This is your standard three-point lighting setup in effect. The thing is though, I've got three lights on myself, but I don't have any lights in the location turned on. I'm going to turn on some of the practical lights to build out this scene. For reference in this example, you can see I've got this lamp up here and then I've also got this lamp here as well. Now, these are on the warmer side, these are tungsten, so that's going to give us a nice level of color contrast. There you go. You can see I've now got these two practical lights on and these are little bit on the warmer side. The problem is though, the backlight which is shining on me, is set to daylights, that is 5500 and that means it's a whiter light, but the light in the back of the scene are warmer light, they are an orange 3200 tungsten. I'm going to warm up this backlight to see if that makes a nice difference. If that adds to that colored contrast. There you go, that is much better already. You can see we've got this nice backlight here and that's matching the color of the lights back in the scene. All we've done here is we've created a three-point lighting setup. We've got our key, our fill, our backlights, and then we've got two practicals in the scene. We could take this one step further and we could add some colored lighting into this. But I think I'd be quite happy to roll with this. If you wanted to, you could actually add a little bit of drama into the scene and we can turn off the fill light. So let's turn off the fill light to create a two-point lighting setup. There you go, that looks really cool. We've turned off the fill, so we've got our key, we've got our backlight, and then we've got our two practical lights in the scene. Because the key lights is up here and the backlight is over there on the opposite side, we're getting this nice contrast and this nice shadow on the face. If I was filming a YouTube video, this is the setup I would go for in this example. This is case study number 1. 12. Case Study #2: In the last case study, we started with zero lights, and then we created this really nice two-point lighting setup with two practical lights. But what if we wanted a little bit more drama and a little bit more color? How would I convert this current lighting setup into that setup? Well, first of all, I would probably begin by turning off these practical lights. I've removed those lights, and that's made the shop feel a little bit more dull. Now let's introduce some color into the scene. In order to do this, I'm going to take the lights that I had spare over here. I am going to take this light. This is my Godox SL-60W. At the moment, it's got some diffusion on it. We'll take the diffusion off, and let's add some colors. You can see we've got these colored gels. Let's go for two different colors. Let's go for two which are on opposite sides of the color wheel. Let's go for green and red. We can put a red light onto this one, and then I can use this backlight to add some nice color up there as well. Or I could actually add in another light to create that nice color contrast. Let's start with this red light. First step, I just want to go ahead and clip this on. As you can see, that red filter is now applied to this light. I'm just going to shine this on the back wall rather than on myself. I'm just going to shine this backwards. That is our first light. We've got the red light now up there. Now we just need to add that contrast in by adding the green lights. Now, I don't actually have another one of these big lights. I'm going to add a strip light into the space, and it's going to turn this green. This is a colored strip light, and by default, it will be set to purple because that is the color of the studio. I'm just going to turn all of this down until we get to that nice red. Now, I just need to find somewhere to place this green light so that we get this nice red-green color contrast. Now, I've added that green in, but at the moment, you can't really tell too much, and that's because this lights upfront is spilling over and hits in the background, so it's washing those colors out. I'm going to take my large softbox off, and I'm going to place this adaptor on the lights. I'm going to put this diffusion on the front of the light to soften that off. That should make a massive difference, and it should help to balance out the background. It should help that background to pop some more. There you go. I've swapped that softbox out, but at the moment, the light is just a little bit too far away, so I'm just going to bring the light down a little. Then I'm just going to bring it closer into the frame. Because the light source is a lot smaller now, I can bring this in a bit closer, and that should create that nice dramatic effect on that back wall again. There you go, we're looking really good. Well, if I was to fix two things in the scene. One, we're getting a little bit of spill back here, you can see, so I'd fix that. Then at the moment, you can see the backlight is white, but I would actually make this more of a red to match the color of the background. I'm just going to go ahead and do that. Now, that looks great, but the problem is my backlight is unfortunately just a little bit too far away, so I've lost the backlight. My next move is to bring this backlight in a little bit more. There we go. You can see that nice red backlight is starting to catch me now, and that looks really nice. The next thing to do, and the last thing to finish this off would be to just add one or two practical lights into the scene. I could turn that computer on, or maybe I could add one of the lamps with a nice red jello over it, or alternatively, I could add a different light into the scene. That's the option I'm going to go for. First of all, I've got this circular light. I'm just going to add this into the scene, and I'm going to change the color of this. We got red and green so let's make this a nice green. That I'll do this. I'll place this into the scene. Then I can also add one of these lights into the scene. Let's change this to a nice green. There we go. Let me add these two lights into the scene and see how much of a difference these make. There we go. I know these two lights are only subtle, but they've really helped to reinforce that red and green color palette that we're leaning into. But they also really help as well to just add a little bit more depth to the shot. There we go. In this case study, we've gone from a standard two-point lighting with practical lighting all set to 32 to 5,500 Kelvin into a lighting setup that takes full advantage of RGB and color lighting. In the next case study, I'm going to take this setup, and I'm going to make this really dramatic and mooder. 13. Case Study #3: In this episode, I'm going to take our color lighting setup and I'm going to make this really dramatic and really moody. My first step is to just get rid of all of the colors, so I'm just going to turn all of the colored lighting off, and I'm just going to leave this one key lights in place. So everything is going off except for the key light. All of those lights are now off and we just have this one light in the scene cast and there's one light onto us. Although to get a really dramatic and a really moody look, we want to ideally bring this light closer into the frame. We want to try and get this as close to me as possible. Because the microphone is on this side, I'm going move the lights to about here, I'm going to shine it very close side wards on towards me. As you can see at the moment, that is very dramatic. Let's just angle this round a bit more. My objective here, by the way, is to try and not let the light spill off into the background. I'm trying to block this lights off from hitting the background and I only want this to catch me, so the background will be dark and then me in the foreground will be fully lit with this one light coming in at the side. You can say I'm going to have a dark side of the face here, but it will be bright here. Now ideally, you wouldn't like this, like poking into the frame, you would like this out of the frame, but I've only got the one clip, so I can't pin up that for now. At the moment this is starting to do what we want it to do, but it's not very intense, and that's because one, the light is spilling onto the background so we need to try and block this light from hitting in the background and then we also need to stop the light from bouncing off this white wall and bouncing up onto the side of my face. We're using a technique here called negative fill. Now, negative fill is essentially just blocking light. In the daylights episode we talked all about bouncing light, so you're adding extra lights in. Negative fill is taking light away. Rather than allowing the light to bounce back onto my face and fill in the shadows we want to stop that with something black so that it gets really dark and dramatic. Now, on video productions, you would have a flag or you would have a large piece of cloth that would block off the lights. But if you don't have access to something like this, which most people don't, you can just use a black t-shirt or a black bed sheet. As you can see, I've got this black t-shirt here and the first problem is to get rid of this light spilling onto the background. As you can say, if we take this away, there's loads of light, but if we add this up, it's added this really dramatic look and it's canceled out some of that light onto the background. But then if we take that same t-shirt and we put it onto the this side of my face, you'll notice instantly there's a little bit more drama to the shot. This t-shirt is basically stopping that light from bouncing and hitting my face. Essentially we want to rig something here and then we want to rig something here and that will give us a really nice dramatic look. As you can see, my super low budget solution here is to get a coat hanger, put the t-shirt onto the coat hanger. Then I've got a microphone stand here. I've got a clip. I'm going to put this clip onto the light stand. Then I'm just going to take the coat hanger, I'm going to hang the t-shirts onto this clip. I can send this light all the way up, send that light stand up and that is going to help to block off that light. Now of course, this is currently in the frame, quite noticeably. I'm going to have to move that over. There you go, that is my super low budget way of blocking off this light. I would just have to try and frame this out as best as possible because we wouldn't want this in the frame. Now, all I'll need to do is add another one onto this side, but I'm going to leave that there for now. But we've got this really cool dramatic look, now, I'm just going to add a very subtle back lights in. As you can see, the key light is on this side, so I'm going to add a backlight in from this side. There you go. As you can see, this is just costing a little bit of light onto the back of my head as you can see this nice hair light is coming through. Then the last thing that I would do to this frame is to just add a very subtle color in the background, just this, that separation between foreground and background. I'm just going to add a very subtle blue to the background. There you go with our key light flagged off with this black t-shirt, our back light up there, and this nice subtle blue light costing onto the back wall, we've got ourselves a really cool and moody look. With me sat in this one room, on this one sofa, I created three very different looks in my lighting. It's really important with your lighting that you think about the color of your lighting, the position of your lighting, and how many lights you're using in the space to light not only the person, but the location that the person is in. So feel free to be really creative and playful with your lighting and your lighting decisions because as you can see, you can get multiple different results from one location and the only thing that changed here was the lighting. 14. Outro: There you go. Thank you everyone so much for watching this lighting course. Lighting is one of the most important parts of any video production process. Regardless of whether you're filming a YouTube video, a TV commercial, or a Hollywood film, lighting is crucial. Putting the time into mastering your lighting will really help to elevate your videos. My challenge to you now is to go ahead and film three different scenes or light three different scenes. The first one should be an interview. The second one should be something a little bit more creative, like a music video. Then the third one can be your choice. You don't actually have to film these videos. Just dress the scene, get all the lights in, and then take a picture of your lighting. Then once you've done that, I would love to see your work. Please do consider uploading your work to the student's project section on Skillshare. If you do, then I promise I will check out your work and comment my thoughts and opinions on your lighting setups. But there you go. If you enjoyed watching this course, then please do consider checking out one of my other courses. I have an introduction to film making course. I've got editing courses and loads more up on my profile. Consider checking out one of those other courses. Thank you everyone so much for watching. Hopefully I will see you on the next course. See you there.