Cinematic Lighting in Small Spaces on a Budget - Part 2

in the second part of our cinematic lighting in a small space series we'll take a look at how we lit these two shots in tight spaces on a budget utilizing small led lighting units this video is brought to you by xyro a great website and online store builder which we'll be touching on a little later so let's take a look at our first location [Music] we're shooting in a small workshop with an extremely low ceiling what we'd like to do is have our subjects stood behind this bench which happens to be the side of the room with the least space so we're going to struggle to place lights around this area which ideally is where we want them if we're going to create something moody and cinematic now we do have this space in front of the bench but it's going to be a little difficult to light from here without making the light in the scene flat [Music] we need to design a lighting setup that will add a little depth and dimensionality to our shot whilst trying to fit lighting units into this tiny space so a good option for this would be some smaller led lighting units a great choice here is the godox m1 we've got bicolor rgb mode [Music] and effects options all built into this tiny panel which gives us plenty of options and versatility when getting these units into tight spaces [Music] so now we know which lights we're going to use we can start building our scene [Music] thinking about typical workshop lighting scenarios especially in a small space one thing that comes to mind is ceiling lighting so maybe a single ceiling light is a key light lighting our subject we also have this door with a window back right so we could throw some light through the window and across this back wall maybe representing some fading evening light from outdoors spilling into the room the bicolor options on the godox units will come in handy here as we can set our top light to a tungsten balance and our window light to daylight let's jump right in and start lighting the scene and let's start with the light coming through the door we set up our m1 unit outside [Music] just a little above the height of the door tilted down one thing i really like about these m1 units is that they've got this articulated arm which makes it really easy to adjust the position of the light when mounted in a variety of situations like we have here [Music] so you can see here just our window light coming in across the back wall we set this to around 6000 kelvin to keep it nice and cool and to better represent the color temperature of evening ambience so we could go ahead and add in our key now but we're going to add some fill light in first when adding fill light it's best to decide where your fill light is coming from in our case although we can see here that our shadows are pitch black if we were actually viewing this lighting situation with our own eyes and not the camera and there really was evening light coming through that door we'd probably just about be able to see into the shadows as those shadows would be filled in with our evening light bouncing around the room or perhaps there could be another smaller window behind the camera letting evening light into the room but less light than our back door [Music] in either situation it might look a little like this here's the image ungraded so you can see it a little clearer to achieve this we set up a muslim bounce behind our camera and used another godox m1 unit set at around 6500 kelvin bouncing from the muslin material we wanted to make sure that our fill light was nice and soft and muslin is a great material for ensuring a really soft even quality of light at the moment it may feel like the fail won't make a difference to our final shot but we'll see what it does soon finally let's turn on our key light which is representing some sort of ceiling light or panel [Music] to achieve this pool of light with a directional yet smooth quality to it we pinned a small square of muslim material onto the ceiling boom deferred godox m1 unit underneath it and bounced the light back onto our subject we also used some black cloth material to flag some of the light off of the back wall and to prevent it from interfering with our window light if we take a closer look at the shadows when our subject lowers his head you can see how our fill light is very very gently filling in the shadows and enabling us to see details on his face even when it's in darkness [Music] it is also creating an added subtle color contrast so along with the cooler background contrasting with our warm key we're tinting our shadows slightly cooler against the key as well so we've seen how small leds helped us for this scene how else can these tiny lighting units help us with lighting small spaces before we break down our next setup don't forget that you can grab my 21 minute color grading tutorial from my website detailing the process of grading two cinematic looks in davinci resolve for just eight pounds along with three practice dng files so you can grade along with the video i've recently made the move over to xyro which means now you can download the full quality tutorial straight from my website with an e-commerce plan from xyro you're able to upload and sell digital products up to 25 gigabytes in size which is absolutely great if you're looking to sell digital products online and you've previously been limited by upload size like i have if you also sell on facebook instagram or amazon you get the tools to manage this all in one place i've been looking into selling some of my photography work as prince for a while now and the ease of setting up an online store with xyro has just solidified my decision to do it zyro's also been the easiest site builder that i've used to build a website and storefront not to mention everything loads really fast when browsing and from a business perspective when you're trying to attract clients with your portfolio or your selling products speedy loading is definitely something you want not only to increase sales but to help you rank better on search engines click on the link in the video description or use the code rob ellis and you can get up to 81 percent off on xyro's one-year two-year and four-year premium plans for a limited time along with a free domain for a year so in our second setup we're shooting in the small attic space we've got this small area to shoot in with the door located on the floor to the back of the room we've decided to have our subject sat on the floor with some candles in front of him providing our key source of light so let's undo all of our lighting and see how this looks with just our candles [Music] now that's pretty different our candles alone aren't providing anywhere near enough light to have our subject exposed properly we're going to have to back up the candle light with some of our own light but before we do that let's build out the lighting for the room first we have our attic door in the back behind our subject so it might be nice to have some daylight spilling up from downstairs so we placed one of our godox m1 units pointing upwards through the door to make a splash of light on the roof [Music] to make for a more stylistic color contrast between the warm candles and cool daylight we set our color temperature to 8 500 kelvin next we added in our fill light motivated by our backlight like in our last setup and to provide that extra color contrast between shadows and highlights we did this the same way as last time by bouncing a second m1 led from some muslim material this time above the camera where we could fit for our key light we simply put our final m1 unit on the floor just out of frame with a layer of muslin material laid on top to slightly soften the output we use the candle effect mode on the godox to replicate the flicker of our candles so we actually had a lot of spill from both our fill and our key on the boxes either side of the frame we could have controlled this with flags or other black material but as we had nothing appropriate to hand while shooting we masked this out in post using resolve's power windows relying on post processing to fix things like this should often be your last option but these tools do exist for a reason and they can be extremely useful when you need them using smaller led lighting units can be very useful when lighting small areas allowing you the flexibility to place lights in tight spaces without taking up too much room and lights like the godox m1 give you a variety of options in terms of color temperature and effects making it much easier to implement the temperatures and effects intended for your scene grab my 21 minute color grading tutorial at rob ellis cinematography dot com forward slash downloads for just 8 pounds and get up to 81 off on yearly plans for your website with xyro using the link in the description or by using the code rob ellis you

Channel: Rob Ellis

Views: 131,587

Keywords: filmmaking, filmmaker, film, cinema, cinematic, cinematography, cinematographer, blackmagic, bmcc, bmpcc, how to, tutorial, moody, lighting, lighting setup, colour grade, color grade, dark, davinci resolve, rob ellis, lighting tips, lighting techniques, learn lighting, fill light, godox, m1, LED, budget lighting, on a budget, technique

Id: Qemfhh3XAFE

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020