Cinematic Lighting: 3 Looks, 1 Location

Home Applications 3 Looks, 1 Location

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Written by Garrett Sammons

Lighting is one of the most crucial aspects of filmmaking. Although sometimes underestimated, lighting can change the entire look and feel of a location. It can also impact the depth of the story told. As such, cinematographers, gaffers, and directors of photography (DPs) need to understand how light works and behaves.

If we do our jobs well as cinematographers, gaffers, and DPs, we can use lighting to create a world that is completely believable and similar to reality. To demonstrate the impact of lighting, we filmed three short scenes using different setups. We used the same location, set design, and subject for each scene, changing only the lighting.

Look 1: Good Morning

There are two key things to keep in mind when discussing dawn light -temperature and harshness. Light is on a color and behavior spectrum, and morning light is particularly harsh. Therefore, we used the Gemini 1 1 Hard to emulate it.

Key light setup We put the 1 1 Hard light on the roof outside a window on the second story of the building. We tuned it to approximately 3200K. For the tight shots, we used a -stop scrim to slightly cut down the harshness. But for the wide shots, it was wide open.

Our key light in this scene was sunlight, which we got using the 1 1 Hard Gemini coming through the window. This created nice, hard, long shadows, which are similar to dawn light. Make sure you use extremely accurate and bright lights that can replicate color temperature well to achieve this look.

Book light setup On the other side, we created a book light that uses a bounce and diffusion combo to create a morning look. The booklight ensured a contrast balance between the sun coming from one side and the shadow on the other side of the room.

Our book light setup comprised of a Gemini 1 1 Soft at 20-25% put through a 4 4-foot Silk. This soft light bounced off a neutral white wall. Here, we were not trying to change the behavior of the light. Rather, the goal was to get enough light to subtly fill in the shadows so that we could alleviate that contrast ratio.

This fill is necessary, even when working with directional light sources, as it allows you to remove unwanted contrast or shadows. However, an indirect source is still preferable because you can spread the light out. Hence, we used white silk while filming this scene. Putting artificial silk on the other side diffuses the bounced light a second time, further scattering it.

Screens For the second shot, we put a -stop screen over the window to change the light intensity. Here, we did not use diffusion because we didn't want to lose the hard light nature. Diffusing too much in this shot would have made the lighting look super soft. As such, it wouldn't match the wider shot.

alt=Gemini lighting plot data-nectar-img-srcset=https://www.litepanels.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Morning-plot.png 1068w, https://www.litepanels.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Morning-plot-300x169.png 300w, https://www.litepanels.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Morning-plot-1024x578.png 1024w, https://www.litepanels.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Morning-plot-768x434.png 768w, https://www.litepanels.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Morning-plot-600x339.png 600w sizes=(max-width: 1068px) 100vw, 1068px title= />

You can also use screens to adjust lighting without changing behavior. The use of a -stop screen and a window here allowed us to stop that down while still maintaining the harshness.

We also used a slightly cooler color temperature for the fill. We had 3200K outside and approximately 4200K (mixed) for our diffused book light. This ensured that it wasn't quite daylight; it was cooler. So, our fill was a bit cooler than our key.

Look 2: Goodnight

Light behavior is very different from night to daytime. There are notable differences in both the color temperature and light behavior. Morning light is very direct, hard light. In contrast, night light goes into the difference between reality and creating a new reality.

With night lighting, the aim is to create a specific overall aesthetic, not to perfectly replicate the real world. The goal is to create a believable reality our audience lives in.

The behavior of light is directly related to the perceived surface area of a source to a subject. However, the moon is so far away that the surface area of that source is perceived to be very small. As such, this primary source of nightlight emits hard light.

Key light setup The night also do

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