How To Light A Set (bright commercial look)

recently we filmed a funny road safety psa in arizona come along and see how we lit and filmed it oh hello nice to see you today i am a qualified uh therapist in my office just kidding this is a set and this is not a real room at all this is the magic filmmaking that i love so much fake rooms in fake places check this out come here these walls are made out of wood here's the city there's no glass in the windows here's some of our gear we're lighting this with aperture lights today we have some stands these are very important and today you are going to see how we light a set like this because this lighting with these lights on the ceiling this does not look good this looks stupid and the artistry and talent that went into making this set deserves artistry and talent with lighting the set we're going to give this a mood so first in my priority list is this window i want this window to look like a real window and real windows are super bright so i want the light coming through this window to be super duper bright what matters is the relationship between the brightness of the background and the room i'm going to start with two aperture novas on the ground pointing up right here all right and here we go let there be light these are the aperture novas they are very bright and very soft so i'm using them in this instance because i want soft light over a large space from a short distance and this is doing the job and i'm doing it from the ground because it's easier why not why do why do it on big stands when you can just do it on the ground okay next we're going to talk about practicals practicals are lights that are in the room like a lamp and i actually asked our set decorator to put a bunch of lamps in this room just because they look good in the frame and they give excuses to add cool lighting so check this out we have three lamps and instead of using regular light bulbs that you can't control so well i have these light bulbs from aputure we are going to put these bulbs in these lamps and we're going to run some power these don't have to be powered they are battery powered but i want to run power to these lamps because i want them to just be on all day and i don't want to worry about it so we're going to secretly run power to all of these lamps and put these bulbs in and see what we like [Music] james the lamp on camera left is looking a bit warm to me even though they're all set to 4000 could you cool it down yeah there we go so what i'm going to do is i what's cool about the app i came in and renamed these so i know i just adjusted the brown lamp uh the lamp on the right side here we go let's go into this one all right let's just cool this down this is actually a 3200 in the back corner okay so we can see that's definitely too yellow thomas what color should i add to this maybe a little magenta sure what we're dealing with is different colored lamp shades and i it's just kind of too much for me to handle so i want them to kind of match so we're able to quickly change the color temperature and make all these look like they belong in the same world together and i think we're at a really good starting point we got our practicals looking good next we're going to put up a 20 foot by 20 foot of bleached muslin over the whole top now we're not gonna see it in camera but this will simulate for my lighting purposes a ceiling and because it's opaque i'll be able to shine light through it and get a very soft feel it's all about controlling the soft ambience of the room and so we're going to do that next stephen or andrews alex alex needs a ladder too see this it's a giant ring of clamps are you afraid of heights a little bit oh my gosh so we're having a major problem right now this giant piece of fabric is trying to implode our set and as we tighten it the walls of the set are coming together and it's about to fall down and i don't know if we're going to be able to make this work so this is kind of the worst case scenario for me just so you know once again this is a disaster and i'm worried about this oh crap instead of clamping all of the 20 by muslin to the walls we decided to use these big heavy-duty combo stands and it worked out great taking the pressure off the walls this is beautiful check this out so now we have our bigs oh where are you what did you transport to a psychologist's office no no no no no this isn't a real room see no no no no you forgot it's fake it's fine let's all pretend it's okay all right check this out these two things here are called strip boxes together these are going to be our back lights i just realized i'm an idiot we actually don't need stance we can use the walls themselves as stands we're just going to put a little cartolini clamp up there and attach the light well the backlights are up after a lot of work and sweat and i'm tired i don't know how to light this scene and i need your help in the comments please let me know how would you like this scene would you do it this way or not this is the aputure 1200d and i like it a lot sometimes when i run out of ideas the best thing to do is to just turn on some lights there we go that's some bright light for you whoa i need a sandbag on this thing it's gonna fall over now we're putting together this eight by thing we're going to put some fabric on it i'm going to grab the aperture spotlight with a 600x and we are going to make it look like the light is streaming through the window hitting one of the back walls it doesn't look good yet it will in a minute handy tip have a monitor on set so you can run around and look at what it's doing we've kind of realized that this this really sucks um there's a difference between bleached muslin and unbleached muslin and we accidentally put an unbleached muslin 20 by above our set so now everything's way too warm and it's just not looking right so we're going to give up for now because if we stay any longer they're going to charge us more for our studio time we're going to come back tomorrow morning hopefully make it right before we shoot these ads everything is riding on this and if we don't get the lighting right you might get fired from this company and never be able to make videos for them again so anyway the next day we came back bright and early with a whole crew and put up the bleached muslin 20 by once the lighting looked great we started to film we started with our wide establishing shot when the actors reached their stride and the scene was feeling well we went in for the close-ups when i film close-ups i like to sweeten up the lighting bringing in lighting modifiers and different lights it may sound counter-intuitive but to make the close-ups look like they match the wide shot you actually have to adjust the lighting for every single angle you've seen us set up the lighting for this but i really want to talk about the lighting philosophy of this setup because that's what is informing all of these decisions the most important decision that was made before we filmed was to have windows in this set now the windows aren't actually lighting our talent but they are giving an excuse to light the talent from the far side of their face so you can see we've set them up here where the windows are kind of behind them and in between them when we go into our medium shots the light we see in the corner of the shot is coming through and this side of his face is brighter than the other side of his face he's looking camera right and camera right side of his face is brighter than camera left this is the formula that you'll see in every major movie you see a window or some light source or some evidence of a light source you see the far side of their face is brighter than the closer side of their face as you can see from this behind the scenes shot we actually brought in this aperture light tube to be a sort of a backlight and then we brought in this white bead board and shined the aperture spotlight onto it and that was his key light and it's at a 45 degree angle and it's actually closer to him than the windows it looks like the window is lighting him but really it's not the window it's this bead board so that's the trick when we turned the camera around and shot the therapists close up we did the same thing we brought our tube light behind her we got our bead board on the far side of her face where the window was and we shined a light on it making that side of her face brighter than this side let's go over this again we've got our key light coming from their far side so when we come into the close-ups we magnify that key light we make sure their face has some dimensionality to it i exaggerate the image by bringing in a backlight and now these medium shots appear to match the wide shots if i would not have done that additional lighting for these close-ups they wouldn't have looked very good the reason why we filmed the wide shot first is because it gives us an opportunity to establish the lighting and the mood for the scene to make sure it's just right also the a lot of times directors like to film the wide first because it takes a while for the actors to really get into a rhythm and to get the blocking down just right and they're able to tweak the scene and make sure they're really happy with everything on the wide once that wide is really flowing well then we go in for the close-ups and my goal on the close-ups is to make people look attractive make them look good for for an ad like this i really want people to look nice but it's to also match the same mood as the wide to have it sit in the same world so if the key light all of a sudden for the close-ups was coming from the another side they wouldn't match i would also like to say that the pre-production time on this was really essential we had our set designer draw a mock-up of the set and we chose the colors of the walls there's actually a show called bad therapy and we looked at some of those images and said ah this like olive green tone is perfect for our wall so we we stole that now this wide shot great it looks okay it's it's a decent wide shot but i would say that these close-ups look really nice and the reason why they look nice is because of the set design because of the the planning that went into where the light is coming from and that's basically it if you liked this video please do not subscribe to epic light media we do not need any more subscribers however you should subscribe to dave mays he's doing incredible things on youtube and he actually cares about every single video he makes he deserves your subscription

Channel: Epic Light Media

Views: 58,936

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Id: 7LurEda-oGY

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 12 2022