MOOD
To merely light for your film practically in order to achieve adequate light levels would be to miss out on one of the major creative elements in filmmaking.
Lighting has the potential to bring your film to life. Just as you would try and get an actor to deliver a line of script in a certain tone or mood, so too should you try and match your lighting to the tone and mood of your film’s narrative. Not only will lighting enhance a line of script or an actor’s expression, it will give the entire film a unified feel.
DP
If you are using an experienced DP, then it is important that you discuss the style and feel of the lighting you want for individual scenes and the film as a whole. If you don’t have the terminology to describe what you want, then your best resource is using examples from other films or photographs.
Large-scale lighting set ups are time-consuming and labour-intensive to create. Always discuss with your DP or lighting designer as early as possible the budget that you have for lighting (including gaffers and sparks) as well as the amount of time you will have at various locations. Both you and the DP will need to work within the limitations of your budget to achieve the look you want. Changing a location or altering a scene could both be legitimate compromises that might need to be made if lighting for your original idea is not a possibility.
LIGHTING YOURSELF
Lighting for film is an art form in its own right and achieving simple set ups can be incredibly difficult and time-consuming. If you aren’t working with a DP and are planning on lighting your own film, then to achieve the look and feel you want it is important to practice. With a basic lighting kit of three lights with stands you can, given enough time and practice, achieve very sophisticated results.
Perfecting different lighting set ups prior to your shoot, when time is not at a premium, will pay dividends when it comes to the look of your finished film. The important thing to remember when lighting yourself is to be as methodical as possible; rushing your lighting or employing a haphazard approach will produce uneven and awkward results.
Light = Danger
Film lighting is extremely dangerous. Whether it’s a single redhead or a studio full of 10K lights, the potential hazard is high. Film lights, their casings and anything on which they are focused for long enough will get extremely hot. Hot enough to cook or melt plastic and set combustible materials on fire. Regardless of whether you are shooting in a studio with stringent health and safety guidelines or at a friend’s flat with no guidelines, you should always take the utmost care in making sure you are not endangering yourself or anyone else in the cast and crew. Always double check that you, your gaffer or whichever crew member is responsible for placing lighting is following these basic rules.
Never touch any lighting even momentarily without wearing heatproof gloves.
Check that lights are securely fastened to stands or attachments.
Make sure the stands are adequately held in place with sand bags or fastenings and there is no chance of them tipping over, even when pulled or knocked.
Ensure that all cables are securely fastened to any floor area they are trailing over. Generously gaffer-taping them down is the normal practice.
Do not have any bottles of water, cups of tea, soft drinks or other fluids within the immediate vicinity of lights or generators.
Make it very clear to the rest of the cast and crew before you turn the lights on just how potentially hazardous they can be. Keep anyone who doesn’t need to be in close proximity to the lighting as far away as possible.
If a light can’t be securely placed, or is precariously placed, don’t use it. You are trying to make a film, not a disaster!
LIGHT TEMPERATURE AND COLOUR
All light sources, whether natural or artificial, have a temperature; this temperature affects the colour of the light. Light temperature is measured in Kelvin, with lower-temperature light sources having a much warmer colour and higher-temperature light sources having a much colder colour. So for example, the extremely high-temperature light source that the sun provides gives a cold blue light, while a candle or domestic light are much lower temperatures and produce a warmer orange light. Although the human eye is extremely sensitive, it often cannot perceive the extreme colour contrast that exists between light sources. Yet they are often very apparent when captured on film stock or video, and the difference between artificial light and daylight is often a major factor in determining how a scene has to be lit and light sources matched according to their colour.
White balance/colour balance
White balance is really a video term used to describe colour balance. Because different types of light produce different hues of colour, images produced in certain light conditions whether on video or film will be affected by the colour of the light. This can often be rectified by either correcting or replacing the light sources, using special film stocks, or in post-production, using a colour grading process. With many video cameras, however, it is possible to instantly rectify the colour balance in camera. By selecting the purest white within a shot the balance can be adjusted back to a pure white hue. The same principle exists when shooting on film, where a colour chart and neutral grey card are used as corrective references for the processing lab.
BRIGHTNESS
In filmmaking, lights and lighting are generally referred to in watts, so for instance common film lights are just called 800watts or 2,000watts because that’s how much power they use and therefore how much light is outputted. Although this only refers to the type of lamp or bulb they use it is also often an indication of the size of the light itself. Regardless of the type or power of the light sources, the amount of light that they produce needs to be monitored and controlled to achieve a well-exposed image.
LIGHT METER
To control the amount of light you use for a scene and achieve an even exposure, you need to be able to measure the amount of light. For this you use a light meter. Light meters allow the DP to precisely measure the amount of light falling onto a subject, or part of a subject, and adjust the light sources until the desired variety of high light and low light tones are produced. The basic principle of light meters is that they allow you to input a shutter speed, so for instance 25 FPS, and then take a light reading. The light meter then gives you a reading in F-stops or T-stops, which correlates with the aperture markings on the lens and allows you to set it accordingly, opening the aperture to let more light in or vice versa.
There are two basic types of light metering: reflected light and incident light. Many cameras have internal reflected light meters that use a sensor to record the overall light reflected from the subject into the lens. Although reflected light meters are useful, because they only give an overall average reading of the whole shot, elements within it could still be over or under exposed. For greater accuracy a handheld incident light meter can be used, which uses a small light-sensitive sphere that can be held directly in front of the subject and directed towards the camera, giving a more precise reading and ensuring that the exposure is set for the subject rather than the overall light in the shot. Spot meters can also be used, a form of reflected light meter that can offer a greater degree of accuracy, allowing you to pinpoint small areas such as a highlight on a forehead, and check for potential over-exposure.
Prosumer video cameras now offer an advanced reflective light meter reading, known as zebra function. This highlights potentially under or over exposed areas of the frame by showing diagonal lines. Similar to a spot meter, even tiny areas of the frame can be pinpointed for greater accuracy.
TYPES OF LIGHT
Film and video lights
For precision lighting, ranges of professional film lights are needed. Depending on the scale and scope of lighting required for your film, a lighting kit can consist of anything from three basic lights that you can place on stands and plug into a domestic power supply, to several lorry loads of lighting that will require generators, scaffolding rigs and a crew of gaffers an
d sparks to set them up and adjust them.
Tungsten
The most common type of film lighting that you will come across for filmmaking is tungsten-based lighting. These lights are so called because they have a tungsten filament that provides a bright, even source with a steady colour temperature. They are the industry standard, and film stocks and video cameras are specifically designed to be used with them. Standard tungsten lights come in various wattages, starting at about 400w and ranging up to 12,000w. The commonest lighting set ups for short films on a small budget are often produced with kits of three 800w lights, known as redheads, and 2,000w lights known as blondes.
Regardless of the wattage, there are two main types of tungsten light, either open face or Fresnel. Open face lights produce an evenly distributed light source, but Fresnel use a glass optic which allows you to focus the light, so that you can produce a wide or floodlit source or a narrow or spotlit source.
Fluorescent
Domestic fluorescent lights can’t really be used for film lighting due to their flicker and colour temperature. There are a variety of professional film lights that work using tungsten-balanced fluorescent bulbs, often in groups to create banks of lighting. The two advantages of these lights are that they instantly provide a soft, diffused lighting source and that they do not generate the type of extreme heats that you get with other film lighting. This makes them ideal for using in small, enclosed locations, as they can be used to directly light sources and, due to their cool temperature, placed close to the subject.
HMI
HMI lights are a type of Arc lighting, which create a light source by burning an arc of gas between two points. They are capable of burning extremely brightly and are often used for creating artificial daylight. This is a specialist light even within professional filmmaking and is only required for certain circumstances that require very powerful light sources. You are much more likely to be using tungsten lights on a short film.
Practical lights
If you are on a small budget, then one of the most effective strategies for lighting your film, that doesn’t involve hiring large amounts of lighting, generators, gaffers and sparks, is to use what is already there. If you are shooting a domestic interior, then you have the possibility of using the existing lighting sources. Domestic lights such as ceiling light fixtures or table lamps etc are referred to as ‘practical lights’. It is not often the case that standard domestic bulbs will have a high enough wattage to create enough exposure for the camera, so these bulbs can be replaced with high-wattage photo bulbs, which are comparatively cheap and easy to obtain from photographic shops. Using combinations of practical lighting such as table lamps is a convenient way to effectively create mood lighting for your film. If you are planning on using practical lighting sources with photo bulbs then care and precautions should be taken. Photo bulbs are much brighter and therefore much hotter than standard domestic bulbs; the amount of heat they generate can easily set fire to, or heat to scorching temperatures, anything in close proximity to them.
Work lights
Due to the very high costs of either purchasing or hiring film lighting, many independent and short filmmakers have looked for alternatives. Tungsten work lights are often a viable alternative to professional lighting, available from hardware stores at a tiny fraction of the cost of professional film lights; they can even have barn doors made for them. The disadvantage of the low cost is that they are less easy to control and tend to hotspot (create an uneven throw of light).
THE CHEAPEST LIGHT
For short filmmakers, using what is available is the key to creating a good-looking film on a small budget. Often the cheapest and most practical source of lighting is natural daylight. As with film lights, it is possible to control daylight; using a combination of diffusion and reflection techniques, you can easily achieve stunning natural daylight shots on the smallest of budgets. Although there is no hire charge or electricity bill to pay with natural daylight, it does have its limits. The winter months give extremely short shooting periods, while the summer months produce long but very bright conditions, making spring and autumn the most suitable times for shooting outside.
LIGHT CONTROL
When lighting for a shot or a scene, you are essentially trying to enhance the shape and form of what you are going to film. To achieve the control needed for accurate and skilful lighting, there are a number of variables that allow the source and quality of light to be manipulated, namely intensity, size, shape and colour.
Diffusion
Tungsten lights are hardly ever used directly pointing at a subject; this type of lighting creates very harsh contrasts, producing deep shadows. Occasionally a desired look, it is generally seen as an attractive lighting style in filmmaking. To avoid this, diffusion is used to change the intensity of a light source by softening it. This creates a gentler feel by spreading the light and softening the harsh edges of shadows. Diffusers come in many different forms. Certain fabrics such as silk are used to create screens or soft boxes, where frames are covered in diffusing fabric, allowing for a soft, even light source.
Trace (also known as diffuser) is also commonly used for this purpose, similar in consistency to tracing paper. It comes in various densities, and is designed to withstand the heat of the lights. An appropriately sized section is removed from the roll and can either be attached directly to the barn doors of the light, or to a frame that the light passes through. Trace is normally calibrated to the stops of a light meter, so that various densities or layers can be used to reduce the intensity of a light by half-a-stop increments. Trace can also be used to control daylight sources, attaching sections to window frames or sticking it directly on to the panes.
Scrims are wire meshes of different densities that you attach to the front of the light. Because lighting comes in a series of fixed wattages, you choose brightness close to what you need and then use scrims to reduce the intensity of the light beam. They are calibrated to the same lighting ranges as light meters, so that a placing a single scrim on a light will reduce its brightness by half a stop.
Bouncing a light source is often the easiest way to instantly create a diffused light source. The simplest method is often to bounce the light beam off an existing surface such as the ceiling or a wall, but when this is not possible, reflectors can be used. Pieces of white polystyrene board are commonly used to bounce light back into a scene as well as screens of silver or gold fabric, allowing the direction of the reflected light to be precisely controlled. Huge frames with large silks attached can also be used to diffuse daylight when shooting outdoors. The most desirable option is often to shoot on a day with even cloud cover, where the clouds create diffusion and produce a natural soft light.
Shape
Barn doors
Barn doors are metal shutters that are attached to the front of a light. They normally consist of four folding metal flaps that can be configured to create different shaped beams. This allows you to create everything from a narrow slit, to a wide-open beam. For more precise shapes of light, snoots are used. These are funnel shapes that can be attached to the front of the light and are used to create certain shapes, such as round pools or rectangular forms.
Flags
Flags are used to block areas of a beam of light, often attached to lighting stands. They normally consist of a metal frame that is covered with fabric, either a scrim material to reduce the amount of light, or a black material to completely block the light.
Colour
Gels
Gels are used to control the colour of the light source. They are available in a spectrum of different colours, and usually available on rolls. The appropriately sized piece is removed from the roll and can be attached to the barn doors of a light, frame or window. Different coloured gels can be used to create mood or compensate for discrepancies in the type of temperature light you are using. For example, using a combination of daylight and artificial light which have different colour temperatures, it is possible
to match them, either using gels on the tungsten lights, or gels on the windows; these are known as colour balancing gels or corrective gels.
THE BASICS OF LIGHTING A SCENE
Different locations, moods and circumstances all call for individually crafted lighting set ups, but the basic principles for lighting a scene or individual subject are often based around the three point lighting technique. Although it won’t provide you with a principle for every lighting situation, it can be used as a basis to create very sophisticated lighting effects from. The beauty of three point lighting technique is its versatility. You can create it with three 800w redheads in a tiny environment, or thirty 12,000w in a huge environment; the type and power of the lighting involved makes no difference to the principle, just the scale you can use it on.
Key light
When beginning to light a new scene the best thing is to start methodically with all the lights turned off and the subject in the general position they will adopt for that shot or scene. The first step is to establish from which direction your most prominent source of light should be coming from, which is generally slightly in front of and above the subject, adjusting angle and height accordingly. This is termed the key light and is the first light you should turn on and position. This doesn’t have to be just one light, it could be several, depending on how much light is needed. A variety of diffusion methods can also be used to create the quality of light you want to obtain.
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