Depending on the angle, these accentuating, textural lights have many names. Backlight usually means a light directly behind the subject, in line with the lens. A backlight that does not indicate the source but just lights the hair is appropriately called the hair light. Also from the back comes the rim light or rimmer, which gives just a thin rim of light to the subject. The next light farther to the side is the kicker, which gives a certain sheen to the cheek as seen from the camera position. Farther yet to the side is a liner, which could be defined as a kicker but is forward enough so that it does not produce any sheen. Glow light comes more from the side and basically creates a little glow on the shadowy side of the face but does not produce any shadows of its own: it has no “kick” to it. For the sake of clarity I have tried to systematize all these terms, but in practice they are used less precisely and sometimes interchangeably. Liner, for instance, may refer to the rimmer or the kicker.
Various cinematographers and gaffers develop their own nomenclature over the years. This variety of light directions represents part of the “palette” of the cinematographer, to be used judiciously when and where it is needed. Incidentally, backlighting need not be a hard, directional light. Many people use soft light to create the effects of separation and light rim on a subject.
Strong backlight is logically motivated by the streetlamp. The ambient room light justifies the soft front light. (Sophie’s Choice, Nestor Almendros, ASC, cinematographer)
(© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)
The actress’s profile is delineated by a rim light. Her key light comes from the right. (Sophie’s Choice, Nestor Almendros, ASC, cinematographer)
(© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
I use almost exclusively soft light for backlight. It gives a little bit more area of highlight and the light is less harsh, so you see the outline but you are not conscious of the light being there. On a location interior you are limited by the height of the ceiling. Under these circumstances your backlights are low. If you are shooting a party with a lot of people milling around, it is quite disturbing when people block the backlight. But if you use a soft light up there, or more than one, then when someone is blocked from one light, he still gets some from another backlight. It is a very soft, easy change; you do not have those harsh on-and-off shadows.
A harder light that gives a real punch may be referred to as a zinger.
Richard Hart, gaffer
A lot of cinematographers like that “zing.” It usually gives a rim-hot backlight on hair to line out the profile, like a kicker. When someone says, “I want a real kicker in there,” they don’t necessarily mean “kicker” as we used to use the term. A kicker was the three-fourth backlight. Now lots of times the term is used for just a real hard punch from some direction. It may be a half light that someone steps into at a point. “Give me a real punch right there,” “real kicker,” “zinger”; they all mean the same thing.
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
In lighting, time is a big factor. A trend in lighting is to get more and more simple, more judicious, about using backlights and rim lights and kick lights. They all take time, so you put them where you absolutely have to have separation. You see unnecessary kickers every night on every channel on television. Lots of guys put them in out of habit, I guess, because of the “key light, backlight, fill light” principle. Sometimes it is nice to have a face that is just almost melting into the background; it depends on what you are doing.
To create the harsh sunlight penetrating this darkish room, an arc was pointed through the window. A soft light was used as the key. (Frances, Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, cinematographer)
(© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)
M. David Mullen, ASC
I tend not to use backlight all the time for separation, because I think that it makes the photography look artificially glossy. I tend to use it only when it is motivated by a practical source in the background. For example, if there is a table lamp to the left of an actor in the background, you can justify an edge light from that direction. If there is a practical dome light in the center of the room, behind where the actor is standing, then you could justify a backlight. Even if such a practical didn’t exist, you could use the backlight if it felt like it was from a plausible off-camera practical source. In these cases, I will tend to keep the backlight to a realistically low level. More often, I use backlight to represent the sun coming through a window, in which case I make it very intense. So I tend to use either a very strong backlight or hardly any backlight at all. I don’t use a backlight automatically just for separation. Occasionally, when I have a very dark-haired actor and his head is disappearing into a dark background, then a little hair light helps to create separation, but I try to make sure it feels motivated by possible off-camera practical sources.
A strong kicker is a part of the glamorized visual grammar of movies, though it can be motivated by a real source. It adds a sculptural quality; it enhances a three-dimensionality and it makes the person pop out more. You can use a kicker effectively, but if you use it too often, it becomes visually repetitive and artificial-looking.
Robert Elswit, ASC
I tried to do Michael Clayton with no backlights, just the change of value in the background. Occasionally what works well is a Kino backlight. You get a Kino in a right spot and you just get a reflection. You don’t see a hard light, you don’t get a shadow when you get it in a right spot. If you have an actor with black hair against a black background, you have got to do something. With Michael Clayton I wanted to feel like there was no movie light at all, like it was available light, and at the same time it is a movie-star movie. He has to look good.
John Buckley, gaffer
I don’t particularly like to do backlights. I prefer to do something deep in the background and highlight it. But if it needs backlight, then I use soft light, just to barely pull the definition out.
Russell Carpenter, ASC
I use soft sources for a backlight very often. I make the decision of using hard light or soft light depending on how dynamic I want it to be. I very often talk with my gaffer. I say, “I want a no-light backlight.” It’s a combination between a backlight and a hair light. We’ll usually put a single- or double-tube Kino Flo, maybe a 2 ft. length or 4 ft. length, which we generally wrap in one or two layers of muslin depending on how much we want it to wrap around the head. So the quality of it is very soft in a way that the person’s separation from the background is almost unnoticeable. Sometimes if we are working tremendously fast and I have no time to rig a light from a wall or ceiling, I might take a Source Four and hit the wall or a card just above the top of the camera’s frame. The light that bounces off the wall will be a very soft backlight. I use the leaf cutters on the Source Four to shape the characteristics of the soft backlight.
Michael Bauman, gaffer
Most of the time I will take a board like a foam core, a 4 × 8 or 2 × 4 depending on the size of the room, and then I bounce Source Four into it. It is an even, soft source. Or sometimes I’ll use Kinos and diffuse them. For a film noir kicker I could use a spot PAR can or a Source Four. Source Fours are great for a hot edge and have a tremendous amount of control.
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
For separation, particularly in black and white, I like one stronger kicker and another softer one from the opposite side.
Dion Beebe, ASC
With backlight I would mostly go soft, but I use small hard lights if I have to throw light across the room. I’ll go with a 300-watt tungsten unit, a Fresnel or something, or even a Source Four, but I tend to run everything through dimmers so I can control the effect of the light, control the intensity of that kick. Often I use a Kino Flo as backlight and I’ll add diffusion
to that. My backlights, if I use them, tend to be soft unless I am motivating something that feels appropriate to be harder.
Len Levine, gaffer
I am not a big fan of backlight. I like to separate by tone, or I might use a reflective backlight. It doesn’t even need to be a source. I like 8 × 4 ft. Kinos for soft backlight. Sometimes you put two of them together so it is 16 × 4 ft. For a kicker, good instruments are muslined Kinos.
Matthew Libatique, ASC
I like the European style of backlight, where you are lighting the background. I learned early that this was more attractive to me and it seems more natural than a backlight. If a hair light becomes necessary, then I prefer to keep it broad and soft to maintain the naturalism.
James Plannette, gaffer
In a dancing sequence I like two three-quarter backlights. As people move through them, everybody has a nice light but there are no bad shadows from the front because there is nothing with any direction coming from the front: it is just an ambient light from the front. This three-quarter backlight could be soft. It could be a Fresnel unit through a frame of diffusion of some kind.
Chapter Five
Strategy of Lighting
The visual style the director seeks for a film will influence the decisions the cinematographer makes about lighting the scenes. There are several general choices the DP must make about lighting technique. Will it be hard or soft? Will it be high- or low-key? Will it be lit to a great extent with practicals or from sources outside the frame? Each of these basic decisions will greatly affect the look of the film.
Hard Versus Soft
Before we go deeper into the subject of composing with lights, we have to look at the character of light itself. Light can be hard, soft, or some gradation in between. Hard light casts strong shadows, and the softest light is shadowless. Hard light is generated from a small source, whereas soft light comes from a large one.
The hardest source of light known in nature is the noonday sun; an overcast sky is the softest source known. It is as if a diffusion material has been stretched from horizon to horizon. The illumination comes from all directions and cancels out the shadows.
Translating this knowledge to artificial lighting, we can create strong shadows with a small source and soft diffused light when the source is large. Next we have to look at the distance between the light source and the shadow-making device, like a flag or a tree branch. Here the principle is that the further the shadow-creating object is from the source of light, the harder the shadow it creates. This explains why the barndoors attached to the light fixture can never give us a strong shadow. The next situation to influence the shadow density is the relationship of the globe to the lens. When a globe is moved, in a fixture, closer to the lens (“flooding”), it creates a smaller, brighter point in the center of the lens. Accordingly, as the light source becomes smaller, the shadow created by this source becomes harder. As a result, a fixture in a flood position creates harder light than when it is spotted. A spotted lamp gives a narrower beam, but the light is softer because the whole surface of the lens emits even light, creating a larger source than when it is flooded.
A good example of the practical application for shadow manipulation is the case of creating a venetian blinds effect. To get the strong shadows, we should set a Fresnel fixture to flood position and move it reasonably far away from the blinds. Actually, to obtain an even stronger shadow, we can open the lens. Now the filament of the globe, a very small source, creates a very strong shadow. This can be done with a tungsten light. On an HMI fixture the lens must not be open because of the serious danger of harmful UV radiation. In this case the lens has to be replaced with a clear lens of Pyrex glass.
Over the years lighting designers, cinematographers, and gaffers have designed a vast array of lighting instruments to produce both hard and soft lights.
The hardest lights in general use are the mercury and xenon arcs. Their light, created between two electrodes, is smaller and brighter than the filament of an incandescent bulb. A Fresnel lens is used with a mercury arc to bring the light into a narrow beam. Incandescent lights with Fresnel lenses also fall in the range of hard lights. Open-face lights can be hard or soft depending on the size of the reflector and on the type and positioning of the bulb. The softest are boxlike soft lights and a variety of lighting instruments made in the studio that consist of rows of bulbs behind a diffusion screen. Even softer sources can be created by placing very large diffusion screens in front of conventional lights or by bouncing light off large reflective screens onto the subject.
To control soft light, whether from softboxes, diffusion frames, or reflector boards, we need very large flags, which can make the set very crowded. Happily this situation can be helped to a great extent by the use of grids called egg crates, which prevent the light from spreading too broadly. The deeper the crates, the more containment of light can be achieved. Lighttools came out with fabric Soft Egg Crates, with which you can, by changing the depth and size of the crates, control the angle of light distribution. They provide various angles from 20 to 60 degrees.
Soft light produces much lower light levels for the same wattage used than hard light and it falls off with distance much faster. In the days of slow emulsions, its use was limited mainly to a general fill function. With the advent of fast color film stocks and sensitive video receptors, however, soft light sources became adequate as the main modeling light. Many leading cameramen developed a style of lighting that utilizes soft light as the chief light source in a majority of scenes. Other equally distinguished cinematographers continue to favor the predominantly directional, focusable key lights; these should be chosen carefully for a particular area and function. There is, of course, a middle ground, which might be to use predominantly soft light but accentuate modeling with some harder sources.
Soft light technique is basically area lighting, which creates a more natural look. Since less equipment is involved, it actually helps to keep the production moving at a better pace, especially when less professional actors and directors are involved. It also allows the actors more freedom of movement on the set. These attributes become rather important with today’s budget considerations. Soft light falls off rather sharply; therefore it must be positioned relatively close to the subject. That becomes problematical in wide-angle or moving shots when a large area of the set is in the frame.
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
Soft lighting is much more difficult to control than hard lighting. It is not what you light that counts but what you don’t light. Anybody can go back there and turn on a beautiful soft light, take a light and bounce it off a white card and get 10 foot-candles or 15 foot-candles, and say, “Ready.” But to control it you have to do many things. You can take it off the actor and just hit the back wall and silhouette him, or you can take it off the back wall. You can make a shadow. You can put a bottomer on it, or a topper, or a sider.
Soft lighting gained its popularity because it gives the scene a more natural, less “filmic” look than hard lighting. At the same time it has a danger of lacking character. In the final analysis, it is just another “brush” to paint with, not the only one.
Caleb Deschanel, ASC
I think that soft lighting is very limiting. There are certain scenes or certain locations that call for that, or certain kinds of moods or atmosphere. I think that soft lighting mainly came as a result of the fact that film reacts a little bit differently than our eye does to light. Soft light was a means of achieving on film what we have a tendency to see with our own eyes. You very rarely see lighting in real life with real strong backlight.
It would be unwise to judge a style of lighting on its own merit. Sometimes the qualities of soft light that seem less interesting are just the qualities needed to serve the story.
Caleb Deschanel, ASC
The argument between hard and soft light is kind of weak because in a sense you really make your judgment based upon whatever the story is. There is a tendency to think
that the philosophy is soft or hard lighting, but in reality the philosophy is, What film am I doing? Basically you should have at your disposal any range of lighting styles.
One has to have practical experience in both styles of lighting to be able to mix and match them effectively.
Haskell Wexler, ASC
Everybody should still work in hard light as well. Not to do it and to say that it has to be all soft light is like throwing away part of the artist’s palette. I think that the more variety you can have, the better it will look. To be able to light well in hard light makes the soft lighting a piece of cake, because a soft light is very forgiving. Soft light, uncontrolled, is still acceptable photographically. It is really hard for soft light to look bad, but it is not hard for hard light to look bad.
Wexler has hit on an important point here. He continues:
One reason soft lighting is so popular is that there is more improvisation today, which is tolerated by the soft light. It is possible to utilize in soft lighting what we have learned from hard lighting, and a lot of good cameramen actually do that.
There are degrees of soft light, which is something to consider. You can light with hard lights, but put either a Croniecone on each unit or a Spun Glass. Spun Glass is not super soft, but it is not hard either. For combining soft light with the punch-through hard light, you have zingers. Any directional light can be a zinger. In Coming Home, I had a soft-lit set with strong daylight coming in. The highlights were two, three, or four stops overexposed, which is the way daylight is. I think that it is more interesting this way. A soft light is basically boring. If you see a film that is all soft-lit, it puts you to sleep. In order to keep it from being utterly bland, you take some other units, still soft with some direction to them, so that instead of having a face evenly lit from the top with one cheek getting exactly as much as the other cheek, there will be a modeling light like a key light. It would not be hard but more as if a practical lamp was lit nearby. This also helps to clean up the eyes.
Film Lighting Page 17