Lighting

Camera choice, of course, has a huge impact on the quality and look of your final project. But picking the right gear is only half the shooting battle. It doesn’t matter how good your camera is; if you do a lousy lighting job, you’ll get a lousy final prod-

uct. A well-lit scene shot with an inferior camera can look much better than a poorly lit scene shot with a great camera. Fortunately, of all of the things that can affect the look of your production, lighting is something that you can actually control.

Lighting is not just a way of making your video look better. Lighting is an essential element in your visual vocabulary. Lighting conveys mood and atmosphere, and is the key to achieving a “film look.” In this chapter, we will discuss tips for film-style lighting (whether you’re shooting video or film), basic lighting setups, lighting for different exterior and interior situations, and lighting for special situations, such as video-to-film transfers and blue-screen photography.

Film-Style Lighting

If you’ve done any research on using video to shoot feature-length projects, you’ve probably encountered this piece of advice: “If you want your video to look like film, you need to light it like film.” What’s the difference between lighting for film and lighting for video? (If you’re just starting out and don’t know anything about “lighting for video,” then you’re in great shape, because you have nothing to unlearn, and no preconceived notions to jettison.)

Shooting on film is technically more challenging than shooting on video, because film stocks are much less forgiving of bad exposure, and proper film exposure requires lots of light. But film lighting specialists, known as cinematographers or directors of photography (DPs), do more than just pile lots of lights onto the set. They use special equipment to control the path of the light, the quality of the lights, the brightness of the lights, and the color of the lights. The amount of light coming from every light source is meticulously measured with a light meter in order to achieve the desired contrast ratio between the highlights and shadows. By controlling these elements, the cinematographer is able to direct the viewer’s eye within the frame.

Lighting, along with focus and framing, which we’ll cover in Chapters 7, “Using the Camera,” and 10, “DSLRs and Other Advanced Shooting Situations,” all add to the visual vocabulary used in filmic storytelling. Film-style lighting is not so much a distinct visual style as an artistic choice that helps tell the story, and it is useful for traditional film cinematographers and videographers alike.

WHAT TO WATCH

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick) was famously shot with only natural light. Jonathan Demme’s film Rachel Getting Married also used natural lighting, combined with handheld camerawork to create a documentary-like feel.