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Chapter 6 n Lighting |
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WHAT TO WATCH
Amelie is a beautifully lit film, where every shot is composed for color, mood, and tone, resulting in a timeless style and a sense of wonder in otherwise ordinary events.
Types of Light
Knowing the types of lights that are available for shooting is like knowing what colors of paint you have available to paint a portrait. Professional lights fall into two basic categories: tungsten balanced (or indoor lights) and daylight balanced (or sunlight). These two categories represent two very different areas of the color spectrum. The light from a conventional indoor lightbulb tends to look orange or yellow, whereas the light outside at midday tends to appear more white or blue. Your camera probably has a setting that lets you choose a lightbulb icon (for tungsten) or a sun icon (for daylight). By informing your camera whether you are in daylight or tungsten light, you are letting it know the overall color cast of the scene. Setting this control is known as white balancing. We will discuss white balancing in detail in Chapter 7, but in order to understand it, you first need to understand how light and color are related.
Color Temperature
First, a quick science lesson: light is measured in terms of color temperature, which is calculated in degrees Kelvin (K). Indoor tungsten lights have a color temperature of 3200°K, whereas daylight has an approximate color temperature of 5500°K.
Color Plate 11 shows the color difference between tungsten light and typical daylight. As you can see, tungsten light at 3200°K is heavily shifted toward the orange part of the spectrum, which results in the warm, golden cast of household lights. On the other hand, daylight at 5600°K is heavily biased toward the blue part of the spectrum, which results in more of a bluish-white light. Be aware that as the sun rises and sets, its color temperature changes, and it decreases into the orange part of the spectrum.
While you might not be able to discern that household light looks orange and sunlight looks blue, the main thing to realize is that daylight is much stronger. (Think of the hotter, blue flames in a burning fire.) Daylight-balanced lights, such as HMIs and LED lights, are over 2000°K stronger than tungsten lights, and if you try to mix them together, the daylight will certainly overpower the tungsten light. If you can’t avoid mixing tungsten and daylight—for example, if you’re shooting a day interior scene that absolutely requires that a real window be in the shot—you need to account for the color temperature differences by balancing your light sources. Balancing your light sources means that you’ll use special lighting gels to change the color temperature of some of the lights (or windows) so that they are all either tungstenbalanced or all daylight-balanced. We’ll talk more about lighting gels and mixing daylight and interior light later in this chapter.
126 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E
Types of Lights
Tungsten lights and daylight-balanced lights aren’t the only types of lights. Fluorescent lights have a color temperature that ranges from 2700º to 6500°K, and sodium vapor lights, with a color temperature of about 2100°K, are yellow-orange. Neon lights vary wildly in temperature. All of these lights introduce special challenges.
nTungsten lights range from standard household bulbs to large lights that require a generator for power.
nHMI lights are daylight balanced.
nLED lights offer lighting similar to HMIs and can be either daylight or tungsten-balanced. They are extremely low energy users, so it takes about 30 watts of power to put out 250–500 watts of light, which means they are great for use in household settings without generators for indie filmmakers. They are also very sturdy, so no worries about broken bulbs, and they do not put out much heat and can run on batteries. Be aware that LEDs with focused Fresnel beams use more power than flat light panel-style LEDS.
nStandard household fluorescents are notorious for flicker and for having a greenish tint, which can be exacerbated on film or video. But you can buy or rent special fluorescent tubes designed for cinema shooting that fit into normal fluorescent fixtures and get rid of the flicker and the green color. Cinema fluorescents can be either daylight-balanced or tungsten-balanced.
nYellowish-orange sodium lights use a very limited section of the visible color spectrum. The result is an almost monochrome image. If you try to color correct later, you’ll have very little color information with which to work.
nNeon lights can easily exceed the range of colors that your camera can capture (these lights produce colors that are outside of the NTSC color gamut), especially red and magenta neon. Even though they tend to be quite dim in terms of lux or footcandles, neon lights appear bright and overexposed due to their extremely saturated colors. (See Color Plate 23.)
Wattage
Lights are also measured in terms of the amount of electric power they require, or wattage. The higher the wattage, the brighter the light. Typical film lights range from 250 watts to 10K (10,000 watts). The powerful HMI lights used to mimic the sun and to light night exteriors require as much as 20,000 watts, whereas a typical household light needs a mere 60 watts. The professional lights best suited for use with video are those with a wattage of 2K or less.
Nowadays, you can get special low wattage HMIs, such as the Kobold series by Bron (see Figure 6.3). These lights use less power and give off less heat than traditional tungsten lights. LED lights, such as LitePanels (see Figure 6.4), come in a variety of sizes, can be batterypowered, and can switch between tungsten and daylight color balance. They use very little power so they are perfect if you are shooting with household power, and they give off little or no heat.
Camera Mount Lights
Camera mount lights have improved dramatically in recent years, thanks to LED lighting. Ring lights are fitted around the lens and camera-top lights (Figure 6.4) use the flash mount. Professional LED lights can switch between tungsten and daylight color balance.
Chapter 6 n Lighting |
127 |
Figure 6.3
A low-wattage HMI light by Bron (with diffusion) and a 1K tungsten light by Arri on a soundstage.
Figure 6.4
This battery-powered LitePanels Micro LED light can be mounted on top of a camera or taped somewhere on the set.
128 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E
The Basic Light Kit for Video
A basic light kit for video provides the minimum lighting equipment necessary for three-point lighting (see Figure 6.5). The typical cinematographer won’t be happy with it, but it’s a considerable step above single source lighting. A basic video kit includes something like the following:
nTwo 650-watt lights (with Fresnel lenses)
nTwo single scrims
nTwo single half-scrims
nTwo double scrims
nTwo double half-scrims
nTwo sets of barn doors
nOne 1K or 650W soft light
nOne egg crate (used to make the soft light more directional)
nThree gel frames
nThree light stands
If you don’t have access to a simple light kit at school or through a friend, you can rent one at most professional still photography suppliers, as long as you can provide a credit card for a deposit. They generally cost about $50 for a weekend. Be sure to avoid light kits with high-wattage lights if you’re shooting video—it’s likely they’ll overpower your set.
Figure 6.5
This Teenie-weenie/Softlite combo kit from MoleRichardson is a good example of a typical tungsten video lighting kit.