I've always wanted to take the time to light the same setup a number of different ways to see how different lighting interacts with a scene. In this instance, I chose a wide shot with a deep enough background that I could put different combinations of light through the different layers of the image.
The reality of most sets is you really don't have time to play with light in the way that I have here. You will have had a conversation with your key collaborator (usually the DP) about the look and feel of the image and once that has been established it's up to you as a gaffer to make that a reality on set as fast as possible. That's the fun of being on set, the rush of getting everything in place as quickly as you can while also maintaining a high level of detail and care for the image.
This rush is fulfilling in the sense that if the DP is happy, so am I! But I also love to slow down, play with the tools available to me and take the time to explore what's possible in a given space. It's also an interesting experiment in thinking about how you would light something and then seeing how close your final setup is to what you imagined initially. The closer you can get your initial ideas to the final product is where you really can save time on set. This process of experimentation is not something I would be doing in a time crunch!
I started with this frame. This is what the room looked like untouched.
The room is already doing a lot of good things for us! There are some big windows to the left of frame and a large open balcony behind camera. This is providing a big volume of light and honestly is already a very flattering, natural image.
To make things a little brighter, I added an additional source to the left of the frame as well as a hairlight. The source was two Aputure 600D's with F10 fresnels through a 12x12 full grid with an 8x8 magic cloth on the corner of the 12x12 closest to talent. Hairlight was an F22c on a boom.
That gives us this.
A few things to note - the window in the background is not totally clipped anymore due to the additional light level. However, the key is not quite the same colour temp as the ambient fill in the room and the talent is now obviously lit. This could be rectified by using a more accurate bi colour or RGB source and matching the ambience exactly. I metered the room at about 4500K and the 600D's were closer to 5900K. The hairlight also is a little overbearing but does a good job of being a hairlight. Camera white balance remained constant at 5600K.
The image now has a litte more contrast and it's more obvious where the light is coming from. This look could be suited to a brighter, commerical white feel although the natural look is also a great option. This is an instance where a good DP will make the call on taking lights away instead of adding them. As all my lights are in the room, they will never look as natural as the massive ambient source i.e. the sky coming in from multiple, large windows.
You could put up a few massive bounces outside every window on crank stands, kill the sun and bring in your own sources - but that's above my paygrade and typically outside the scope of the work that I do (so far!).
As the sun set on our location, I moved onto some setups where I had more control to light the frame.
This setup is a similar combination of sources used for the previous setup. A few lights are now doing double duty, most notably the hair light which also now lighting the table in front of talent. The deep background is lit with an Aputure 600C bounced from the ceiling. An Aputure MC was placed on the laptop to emulate the laptop screen while giving me finer control over CCT and output. The practical lamp in this image really helps motivate a lot of what is happening. In reality. it's doing very little.
This frame is a very beautifying, soft, warm night look. What happens if we add some colour?
By changing the 600C in the deep background to purple, and then matching that with the hairlight we get the feeling that the purple light is spilling from the backgroud onto the back of talent. In reality, it doesn't even get close. The practical lamp is still doing a good job of motivating our key, which remains the 12x12 full grid with magic on top. This image is bright and full of colour. What happens when the mood of the scene has changed and the DP calls for something low key?
This frame is still keyed with the 12x12, but at a fraction of the intensity of where it was in the previous setup. Most of the light in the frame feels like it's coming from the practicals, which is a good place to start for a low key setup. The kitchen is now also considerably darker in the deep background and some texture has been added with a Forza 60C with fresnel through the louvres. Hairlght has been cooled down to match the source coming in through the windows in the kitchen.
All of these setups are in the realm of narrative possibility - but what if you want something that isn't naturalistic at all?
A big component of this setup is haze. The key remains the same size but now features another Forza 60C in full red as the light source. 600C in the kitchen is full red, as is the hairlight and the B7C practical lamp on the right of frame. The practical lamp to the left of talent has been cooled to 5600K and really helps delineate the focus of the scene. A red practical here would perhaps have been too much. The haze does a great job of unifiying all these sources into one complete wash of red.
And now finally for some fun - what about hard light? Every single setup shown so far has primarily soft light, either from diffusion or bounced. What happens when you limit yourself to no bounce and no diff?
The key here becomes an Aputure 600D with fresnel at 1%, arranged in a way that is flattering to the lens. It's quite boxed up with only talent and some of the couch being hit. Hairlight becomes an Aputure 60X in full flood, which does double duty again by lighting the table in front of talent. The slash on the tiles in the left of frame is another 60X. The practcal lamp on the right of frame has also been replaced with a bare bulb in keeping with the hard light only theme.
I really enjoyed playing with hard light! It's not something that ever really touches talent in this scenario, for a number of reasons. It can be unflattering, especially on older performers and can also accentuate unwanted aspects of a face. But in this instance, from a distance I think it's quite beautiful. The shape you get from hard light is where it really shines, with the texture on the tiles in this frame something I really like.
Light has so many qualities and abilities to change and influence emotion in a frame. I was joined on this test shoot by a handful of assistants. First of all an enourmous thank you to Eleanor Sommerville who kindly donated her living room and face for 10 hours, as well as Isabelle Rae-Argo and Maggie Solomon for being my lighting assistants. I was also joined by a young DP, Remy Webber, and I found myself almost immediately unconciously trying to please his eye. This was something I wasn't expecting. I had organised the shoot to allow myself the time to play and enjoy the process of lighting, but then found myself phrasing my comments on the lighting as questions to him.
I think this speaks to the learned hierachy of lighting on sets. So much of what I do is colloborative that it's a hard language to unlearn. This is also why I love working with a DP! I've always loved the idea that we could both (the DP or the gaffer) do the lighting ourselves, but together, we can do it better. I really think that's a very fruitful way to look at lighting and colloboration in general. Have the confidence to do it yourself, but also know the best results are achieved in collobaration.
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