How to Light for Darkness | 5 Cinematography Techniques

hey it's valentina v and today we are shooting a gritty moody office scene i'm gonna show you how i take it from this to this this is a dramatic office scene at night kind of like a rival independence day and honestly one of my favorite movies love actually don't tell anyone i feel like this lesson has a lot in it it is how to shoot with big windows how to shoot using color contrast how to make a point of view shot how to create suspense using color and how to do lighting gags so enough talking let's start showing i chose this location because of these giant windows i really wanted a location an office location that i could shoot at night that had city lights because beautiful city lights in the background nice bokeh it's gonna look so good i cannot wait the whole idea is there's a boss in the office the boss leaves for the day and then oh the hacker who's been hiding in the office the whole time pops up and starts hacking away at the computer system but the first thing we need to do is set up the boss's office so this is the office it's currently looking a little boring a little bland so first step production design we have to put this painting on the wall we have to probably exchange this boring looking desk for a fancier looking one and we have to use whatever props we can find throughout this location to dress it up make it look fancy like a boss is here white walls suck in my opinion and it is the like prime way to separate the halves from the have-nots i feel like when you're starting as a cinematographer you just focus on the camera right and then you get into the lighting but you also have to really consider what you're shooting if you're shooting just blank walls it's just not going to look good no matter what you do that's part of the reason why i didn't want to shoot in this direction right a lot of blank walls in our office here we are doing our best to cover up the white walls to cover up the space to make it really really flavorful to make it really really dynamic so i think that's a big part of it i think that's a big part of what you have to think about as a cinematographer how do you make your how do you go to flavor town on your shot you're probably wondering uh how is this a night shoot when it's daytime well it's actually sunset when you're doing a night shoot it's just easier to come in around sunset and start setting up so by the time that you have camera up the sun has already set and you can start shooting for this because the boss is working late at night maybe he turned off the lights in his office already he's only lit by these two lights so they got to be film lights so i have aputure b7cs if they're not film lights they're going to potentially strobe on camera they're going to be poor quality i can't control the level or intensity of them and i can't control the color so with b7cs i can control everything from an app right next to my camera i don't even have to walk up to them so that's essentially the main lighting for this scene i think it'll be a little bit warmer than general tungsten there we go tada nice warm glowy office we will have some atmospheric some general blue coming from the windows it's actually going to be coming from this nova panel over here so this is another rgb light and we're going to set it to a moonlight blue so that it can kind of come in and give a little bit of ambient light as well and also blue and orange contrasting colors it always looks really nice on camera careful your eyes striking all right so let's let's make this blue i'll go over to the colors and i'll just go over to blue okay here's the thing about moonlight moonlight is not blue when you're actually outside moonlight is white it's a reflection of the sun right but in a lot of movies they use blue to convey moonlight because that's what we're used to seeing a lot of times what we're used to seeing is more important than what actually exists so my take on moonlight is that it has to be believable to the viewer this is our dana dolly this allows our camera to have a very smooth forward and back motion and i'm going to be putting a 50 or an 85 millimeter lens on it and that way we also compress the space so the office looks bigger because we're showing less of it we are using the canon c70 with the canon cne lenses and the small rig map box and rail system i like it it's the perfect little package so okay so now that the camera is placed we obviously need talent in the shot so i have my friend steven steven's actually an amazing director that i work with who's doing me a solid so thanks steven appreciate it okay now what i want to do is i'm going to move the light over here and i'm going to move this light here so that it's lighting his face up more evenly so i'm redesigning this shot a little bit because sometimes you set something and it doesn't work exactly like you wanted it to don't be afraid to play with it so i'm setting my white balance to 4300 kelvin and the way i determine that is by looking at the lut on my monitor and seeing what the image might look like if it's color corrected because i'm using non-traditional white balances for my sources alright we're all set up let's go for it [Music] now we're going to do the wide of the shot that we just did from the hacker's point of view and part of it is that the office lights are on now if we keep the actual office lights on it's going to be a mess because a they're everywhere and b there's a light that's directly above here and as you can see it's creating some unfavorable shadows on my face so we are going to take these lights this is the aputure 300 d2 and the spotlight mount the reason that i'm using the spotlight mount is because it can send a directional beam of light and that beam can be square so what we're going to do is send this light directly at two of the lighting fixtures up top and make it look like the lighting fixtures are emanating light when in fact they're just being lit up by these spotlights that way we can control which two are on and we can turn them off with a lighting gag so matt you're gonna copy exactly what i'm doing uh with that light over there so move it back about six feet away from the fixture what i'm doing is i'm putting both of these 300s that are aiming up at the lights on the same group together so that when he touches this fake light switch which is just a remote control that we tape to the door they can turn off by somebody tapping on that group i'm keeping the nova on in this same exact color through each of my scenes not only is it going to help transition from the reverse shot but it's supposed to be moonlight it's supposed to be just light that's eliminating coming from the windows it's gonna also provide some ambience for us in this office setup because remember the boss turned off the main lights so the only stuff left the only lights left in the scene are gonna be our moonlight and the one light from his office it's important to have just something there for ambience everything here is set and i'm gonna be here hiding like the hacker i am with a handheld camera because the handheld look is very voyeuristic it's very oh all of a sudden like you're in the eyes of someone and you're watching the scene happen from far away okay let's roll it now we're going to flip over to the reverse and this time we're going to shoot the wide first and then the close-up even on the edit it's the close-up first and the wide because i want to see where the placement of all the lights is and then it's just easier to punch in and i like having this wide frame because the wider you are the more the foreground elements can create a parallax in the frame if you're going side to side and the more that we can use the production value of this office the mc lights is our third lighting gag it's lighting gag day when you use real computer monitors and light from real monitors you're going to get some issues you might get flicker you might get rolling bands and you can't really control the intensity and the spread of it that's why i like faking it with mc lights not only are these rgb so i can dial in the color but i can also dial in the intensity and have matt off camera with siduslink turning them on boom so we needed to place them lower on the actual monitors that way in the wide we don't see the reflection of the mcs in these glass panels shooting with reflections is always difficult especially in wides that's why i'm glad that there's so much production design that we can use to cover it up we have a third mc that i put up here because remember the boss left one light on in the office well i'm gonna match the color of that light with this mc and cast a little bit of light onto these foreground elements so that they're not completely in darkness and we still ground it in the same scene and last but not least i have my nova up here and it is the same color temperature as before it's providing just a bunch of ambient light i noticed that when the novo was hitting directly it's still too much light it's still just looking fake it's looking like fake moonlight especially because the moonlight's supposed to be coming from the windows so instead i'm going to decide to bounce it off of this wall you don't want moonlight to be harsh the nova the fake moonlight was picking up on these front monitors way too hot so that's why i bounced it against the back all right let's get this [Music] [Applause] [Music] next shot is the close-up all right so two options first option we can stay on the same focal length come on up closer but in that case we actually don't see a lot of the bokeh from the city lights in the background and that's going to provide us with just a lot more dynamic of a shot so if we change this focal length from being super wide we're going to compress that background and really have the lights pop out i want to try to keep it wide still and have the dolly here but i think we're going to move to a 35. uh that looks good the only thing that i'd like to do is just move over that nova because right now it is too far away and our own shadows are actually going to get in the way so if we turn off the mcs in the front we'll see just a little bit of ambient moonlight happening we also moved the mc up here because we still want for continuity sake we want a little bit of that foreground tungsten at the beginning of this camera move when we are looking underneath the table there is no light there right so we're not seeing anything but because we've established that there is this blue ambience all over the room we can pop another mc under that table match it in color temperature and color with the nova and almost extend that moonlight to be under the table so it's a fine line that i'm writing between the exposure underneath the table and then the bright pop of light from the monitors all right let's shoot let's go for a take [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] that is how i lit this nighttime office scene using the windows to my advantage using fake moonlight a bunch of lighting gags of things turning on and of course watching my exposure values to make sure that my subject is properly lit and other things fall into darkness i'd like to know if you are lighting a set like this or maybe a different type of office scene how would you light it would it be similar would it be different let me know in the comments for your chance to win an mc light one of these and also just let me know any other comments that you have on your mind i would love to know uh if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel you can also follow me on social media until next time happy shooting [Music]

Channel: Aputure

Views: 230,887

Keywords: aputure lighting, cinematography, photography, cinematic night interior, computer monitor film, rgb light, bounce light, diffusion, production design, white walls, good film lighting, office at night, creating suspense, moody lighting, key light, backlight, underexposed, how to light, filmmaking motivation, filmmaking process, production design for film, production design behind the scenes, how to shoot a movie with one camera, aputure lighting setup, david fincher mank

Id: rNggiaosjuw

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021

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[u/aputurelighting]

Thanks for sharing!