In immediate and practical terms, the character of light will be initially designated by the time of day. Day interiors are affected by sunlit windows. Many cinematographers call sunlight coming through the windows sourcey light, meaning that it is well defined in its origin. Practicals, or lights visible in the scene, are also sourcey.
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
Lighting depends on the picture. I really believe that daylight scenes should be lit softly except for harsh sunlight coming through the window, which is sourcey. But most daylight scenes are very soft and should be handled like a bounced light, no shadows and all that. But night interiors and night exteriors are, in real life, very sourcey. Sometimes you have hard light with practicals. Candlelight is a sourcey light. You really try to follow reality as much as possible. I do not like to light with hard sources anymore unless that is the way it is in real life. Almost everything nowadays is done through some diffusion material, unless you elect to be sourcey.
If you go too soft in the lighting, it just becomes boring. The difficult thing is really to light softly but to create a contrast at the same time. This is a difficult thing to do. Soft lighting can be more or less directional depending on the mood of a scene and the kind of set.
Directional light can be made soft through diffusing and bouncing. Soft light can only become partially directional with the use of flags, grids, and teasers. Creating varying degrees of softness and directionality becomes one of the important methods used to create mood through lighting.
Richard Kline, ASC
In directional lighting we will take a unit and we can slip in a soft material like a Spun Glass, a diffusion material which softens the light. You can use frosts and you can also bounce the directional light, which I do quite often. I take a very strong light and bounce it off the card and then box it in with gobos, rather than using the generality of the overall soft light. It all depends on a scene.
When I do a film, I try to get a variety of looks because if the whole picture is soft-lit, it becomes boring, and I have seen that quite often. Yes, it is pretty—each frame is gorgeous—but after a while it is meaningless because it is repetitious. For the overall picture, you need a variety of looks, and not just for the sake of variety. Most of the time in a story there is generally a night and a day, which require different looks. There are different times of day and there are different rooms, which could dictate different looks. Sometimes you achieve a different look strictly through a bounce light. Bathrooms or kitchens, which are usually soft during the day, are ideal places. They might be a place to use the overall soft light, I think, but then again you come into a living room and it is usually down a bit, moodier, even if it is very soft. There are usually darker areas; you can make a set look soft and still go directional.
Experienced cinematographers see soft and hard light as two extremes in the whole range of light characteristics, each useful for certain applications.
James Crabe, ASC
To try to differentiate lighting generally by saying that there is hard lighting and there is soft lighting, one has to remember that there are a million variations between hard lighting and soft lighting. I certainly think that today the tendency is to use more soft sources that are more akin to what we experience in life, except in a tungsten situation at night, where lightbulbs and small sources are casting hard shadows. Much of what we see is bounced light, and with the faster film, it can be done.
I think the pendulum always swings first one way and then the other: at the very beginning of motion pictures, the first studios were covered with muslin that would allow only soft light to come through. But, of course, there are many possibilities and effects available to soft lighting. Anyone who dismisses it as being easier to do or just a cheap shot is not really thinking about it. It is difficult with soft lighting to keep the sources out of the shot, usually because you often want them around a little bit. You can always put a junior up, out of the set, or a baby, or something, but to have a large radiating source like a bounce card from an interesting angle, particularly on real locations, quite often takes a lot of effort and thought.
John Buckley, gaffer
Soft light has been a trend for the last fifteen years. Largely it’s because of what happened in acting techniques through method acting, namely that actors don’t hit the marks like they used to. They want more dynamic range. Hard light is very specific, and if you want it to look good, you have to hit that mark all the time. The new style of acting makes it impossible to do. We went into bigger soft sources so people can move around.
Russell Carpenter, ASC
I don’t think that there is anything generally easy about soft light. Large soft sources still have a direction to them and have widely varying characteristics depending on the type of diffusion, how large the diffusion is, and how far it is from the actor. The transition from the light to the dark certainly changes depending on how large the source is and how far away and where it is. Some say people light with soft light because it is easy. I don’t agree. I find that even with soft light one has to be vigilant all the time and that moving the light a few inches can make a tremendous difference in how the subject photographs. I do think that the art of lighting with hard light has fallen out of vogue and is now something of a “lost art.” There are few people who know how to do it the way that Douglas Slocombe or Vilmos Zsigmond can do it.
Allen Daviau, ASC
I tend to think that philosophically most of the time you have to have them both. In the real world you go out there and there is soft and hard light and there is mixture. So we’ll have to do with the soft and the hard light blending together. But probably most of the time I would rather use a soft light. I would rather have a soft source and cut it very naturally, because I feel that it just flows in everything else very well. But sometimes I want to have a hard light.
One hard light source creates one shadow, used here for a dramatic effect. (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.)
Although cinematography began with soft lighting, for a good fifty years hard lighting predominated. The slow emulsions required lights with a kick to them. The resulting style was characterized by sharp shadows and well-defined areas of light. This created a rather dramatic, stylized quality. Since the sixties the trend toward more realistic treatment of the story has led the way to soft lighting.
Robert Jason, gaffer
When I work with Lajos Koltai (ASC), his favorite light is a soft light bounced back through some type of diffusion. He uses the soft light the way cameramen used to use hard light. He is very, very exacting with his soft light; he doesn’t let it go everywhere. He is very, very controlling with it. It is a lot of grip work. I think soft light well done is not necessarily faster. So many people think it is faster. It is, if you are sloppy with it. But if you really want to do beautiful soft light, it is rather time-consuming, because it entails a lot of grip work and it entails grips that understand lighting. And that is not always so easy to find these days.
I think that every show and every set has its own flavor and it needs to be considered carefully. No two are the same. Faces are also different. Sometimes a bounce back with diffusion is good; sometimes just a bounce by itself is good. Personally I don’t like to get stuck with just one idea. I like to keep in the back of my mind every tool that is available and use what’s appropriate for the time.
Controlling Hard Light
In real life we are used to having only one shadow. On the set each hard light casts a shadow. Multiple shadows on film are distracting. Cinematographers take great care to minimize multiple shadows.
The key light in this shot comes from the back. It is generated by a 5K senior positioned on the fire escape as low as the frame line permits to get the long shadows and bright highlights. The frontal fill light is created by a small 1K soft light with an egg crat
e grid. This lamp simulates the lights illuminating the playbill posters on the left wall. (Frances, Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, cinematographer)
(© Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing, a division of MCA Inc.)
A cutter is used to project a shadow over the area where a microphone shadow would be visible on the wall.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
One shadow seems to be legitimate and logical. But when you get two, it takes the attention away from the actor. Sven Nykvist would accept one shadow if he absolutely had to, but definitely not two. He was the whole school in himself when it comes to simplicity. Beautiful simplicity is not necessarily easy. We in Hollywood would tend to overlight. He knew that there is a place for real glamour, and he would take time to create the lighting for a visual effect. But if the rest of it was not important for the dramatics, he would do it simply. Expressions like “simpler is better” or “simplicity is a key to beauty” bear out this principle.
The creation of softer or harder shadows to take the light away from certain areas is a way to control light and create mood in the scene. A large arsenal of light-restricting devices has been developed over the years specifically for hard lights; they are often too small to be used with soft light. From ever-present scrims and barndoors on the lamps, to cutters, fingers, sticks, and shadow forming devices known as cucolorises, a.k.a. cookies, they all help to keep the light from being in one tonality. They come in a variety of sizes and shapes to hold back the light from carefully selected and often very small areas. Some are designed for very specific uses. The cutter, for example, is often used to hide the shadow of the microphone.
A two-light setup to cover a two-person scene. The half scrims are used to even out the illumination. Here the key light for one person serves as the backlight for the other.
James Crabe, ASC
The microphone is very often close to where you want to put the light. The actor faces both his key and his microphone, so in the old days, it was handled by sharper lights and harder cutters. Movie audiences over the years got accustomed to seeing walls that always had shadows on the top and were always bright on the bottom. It also made the shot look more attractive. Even so, it was used to hide the microphone shadows. Soft light can sometimes be more deceiving because a hard-light shadow is really easy to see, but a soft-light shadow can be very difficult to discern. Everyone has to keep a close watch. You’ve often got to use lights that are on stands on the floor to get them under the microphone itself in order to cut that shadow out. It is therefore very important for the soundman and his boom man to watch the rehearsals, because nowadays the directors are much tougher on crews. In the old days there might be a dolly, a track that makes a simple little movement. But today, with zoom lenses and all the other techniques used, the miking of a scene can be really complicated.
Evenly lit flat areas often need to be broken up with shadows. Devices used to restrict light range from solid flags to translucent netting.
A rectangular scrim is used here to limit the light level on the actor sitting closer to the light.
Philip Lathrop, ASC
When you have to light frontally because location limitations do not allow other angles, then you need many nets and cutters to break up the light and take it off the foreground. I have had as many as twenty cutters on occasion.
Another way to limit the frontal light coverage is by putting up cardboards with slits, holes, and so forth, in front of the light source. This method is sometimes used in television commercials and is characterized by hard-edged frontal lighting. Hard directional light is also modulated by nets in various shapes and sizes.
Ralph Woolsey, ASC
White is probably the most troublesome thing to deal with where tonal control is concerned. You have to do something in a close-up shot where a face is competing with a brilliant white shirt, which is sure to be an eye-catcher; it will almost burn a hole in the film. For hard-light lighting the “chin scrim” was once used. It was shaped like a crescent moon and was often handheld to shade a white blouse or tuxedo shirt. Today on medical shows the doctors and nurses wear green outfits and there are green drapes in the operating rooms. That practice did not start because of films but happened because it lessened eyestrain. It certainly helped in filming, as many of us who struggled with glaring white sheets and uniforms can attest. Today, where props and wardrobe are controlled, gray-tinted materials are used, or light-colored fabrics, all of which finally reproduce as white. Otherwise a lot of time may be required for “aging down” white pillars, window frames, tin roofs, and the like when they are obtrusively bright areas. Often temporary paint can be sprayed on small props, and dulling spray can do wonders with brilliant kicks. The subject is very extensive; a book could be written.
One of the most common uses of nets and metal scrims is to create an even light intensity when the actor is moving toward the light. For example, the half scrim covers the lower part of the light so that it equalizes the illumination when the actor moves closer to the light. This result also can be achieved with a net positioned on a C-stand in front of the lamp. You can also use a net as a “floater”: the net is moved into a certain position during the shot. For example, when an actor is crossing a hot light, you can “float” a net in front of it.
The light-cutting power of any net is affected by its distance from the light source.
When a scrim is positioned at an angle, it becomes optically denser and cuts down the light more effectively.
Ralph Woolsey, ASC
When you use a single net or wire scrim very close to a directional light, it will darken the affected area about half a stop. But if you take the same net ten feet away from the light, it will darken an area even more because now there is more density as the openings of the net are relatively closer together. To use a net at its intended value, you have to keep it close and perpendicular to the source beam. To make a scrim more dense, you can foreshorten its angle to the light, thus making the holes relatively smaller. And by turning a solid flag centered in a light beam, you can use it as a poor man’s dimmer, provided this change does not make a visible shadow.
When lighting with hard light, one usually lights and modulates the sets separately from the scene taking part in the foreground.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
Normally you light your sets pretty much separately from your action in the hard light, and you are using any number of units. You can use one 10K to light the set, put a cucoloris on it, or put a shadow across the wall, and you break it enough to create some kind of mood.
Using and Controlling the Various Types of Soft Light
Generally there are four categories of studio soft light: commercially built box-type fixtures, studio-built light boxes, any lamp with diffusion in front of it, and light from any source bounced off a reflective surface. The categories are frequently combined. A hard-soft light quality, for example, can be created by projecting a hard lamp through silk, or a soft-soft quality can be achieved by bouncing light off a white card and then passing it through diffusion material.
BOX-TYPE SOFT LIGHT
The box-type commercial soft lights, which come from 750 to 8000 watts, are generally more controllable than the other soft lighting methods. The grid on a soft light is a truly useful accessory. Often called an egg crate, it has enough depth to give certain direction to the light and to limit the spread.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
The egg crate grids are very useful when you are working in small spaces and you want to use soft lights but there is no room to put flags up in front for control. So you can put these grids on to direct the soft light in about a 45-degree angle and do most of your control. You save three flags maybe and you control the exposure. For example, you can have three people on a couch lit from one side, and rather than using nets, you can give them an equal exposure with the use of the grid. The source is big enough to be soft, yet it is not so big that it wraps aroun
d, or soft to a point of losing some details in the features. It is soft enough to eliminate hard shadows, yet hard enough to be directional. You can put the grid over the camera, in a hallway, for example, where you are limited in space, and you can tip that grid to a position where it will cut a certain amount of light in the foreground. You will get a very even foot-candle reading on a person walking toward the camera. Sometimes, when the ceiling is not high enough, you may have to tip it up when the person is coming forward, because otherwise he or she would walk directly into it.
Film Lighting Page 18