Production Advice and Falstaff News

There is a term for a film made without light. It's called radio.

That's how the old saying goes and it is no less relevant in the world of video. Without proper lighting, you you lose color saturation, add grain and noise to the picture, and miss out on an aesthetic associated with big budget film, television, and commercials.

You can add depth and style to your video with a few creative lighting choices. Depending on your budget, you can rent lights from a camera store, make a visit to the nearest hardware store, or just grab the reading lamps off a couple of nearby desks (ask first!).

We see light. When we look at a book, a person, a computer monitor, we only percieve it by the light it reflects or emits. The same is true for your camera, with one important difference: we can adapt and interpret what we see. A camera cannot. When creating a two-dimensional image on screen, we need to manufacture dimension and depth; those visual cues that in the real world are processed with the help of movement and binocular vision and experience are no longer reliable. They are also entirely under the control of the filmmaker.

So, we're back to step one. How does the director control those visual cues? There's framing and camera movement, focus, and light.

For our purposes here, it will be best to talk about some of the things you want to look out for when setting up the lighting for your video project.

Light quality

Light quality boils down to hard and soft sources and everything in between. Halogen lamps, flashlights, and direct sunlight are examples of hard light. They come from a single point and cast hard shadows. Soft light is diffuse—the type of light you get from flourescent lights, soft white bulbs, and an overcast sky. Soft light is flattering, but boring. Hard light shows all of the features on a person's face (and these shadows become more pronounced as the angle of the light moves further from the camera). If you're working with non-actors in a scene where you are not going out of your way to establish emotion or time of day, soft light is the safe choice.

Angle of light

When you are setting up lights, it is always a good idea to put yourself in the position of the audience and ask, "where is that light coming from." If you are setting lights on the floor—maybe that is the only place you could find out of the shot—and they are casting heavy upward shadows on the wall, that's something that is going to get noticed. Again, this is less of a hazard with soft light sources. It is also important to note that the closer an object is to a light source, the softer its shadow. If you don't have access to film lighting equipment that provides you with many options for controlling how and where shadows fall, just place lights in positions where the shadows seem natural. It may help to know that having a light source in the shot itself is okay; you can have a lamp or a window in the scene as long as the light coming from that source doesn't overwhelm everything else (and if that is your intent, that's okay too).

Colour Temperature

Our eyes adjust to the colour of light sources so that they all eventually become white. Cameras don't. The most likely problem you will encounter is the mixing of sunlight and incandescent or halogen lighting. (A close second is the green tint that most commercial flourescent lights emit.) Sunlight is blue, the other light is orange. You can mix both sources in a shot, but it is good to be aware of what you are doing. Your camera will allow you to select a white balance—you decide what colour of light will appear white. The colour of the light from other sources is then determined by this setting. Once upon a time, we would cover every light source and window with a colour gel to get all of these sources to match. However, it is just as common now to leave the lights as they are or even correct them in the other direction to add more colour to the shot. If your subject is by a window, chances are good that one side of his or her head will be a little blue, and the other a little orange. If you're okay with that, and you think the audience will be as well, no problem.

To be continued...

In the mean time, just remember the words of Spiderman artist Stan Lee, "those aren't mistakes. That's style."