Lighting Hacks for Filming Interviews in Small Spaces

hey folks welcome back on my last interview setup we had an amazing location lots of time and an abundancy of light to work with on today's interview setup we had the exact opposite we had to work with a really small location we only brought one of our own lights and we were strapped for time but we still made it look high production quality how we did it I will show you in this video my name is Damien Cooper and welcome to another cinematography breakdown the video that we were filming was a small commercial for a beauty clinic in particular we were talking about skin care and how our protagonists had really bad skin and form of acne and now afterwards she's really happy with her skin and the story we wanted to portray also plays a little bit into how I lit this interview set up but I will talk about this in detail a little later let's start our breakdown with the location and as I've already mentioned it was a really small apartment that our client booked for us one side of the apartment was covered in mirrors so we couldn't shoot in this direction because otherwise we would have been visible in a shot that only left us with one direction to shoot in and we couldn't really create a lot of depth and separate our subject from our background because again the location was really small since I couldn't physically separate her from the background because the location was too small I had to use some lighting trips but I will talk about this in a minute let's only really briefly talk about the camera equipment that I use and that was a Blackmagic pocket 6K with the sigma 18-35 I only used one camera on the shoot because I shot this commercial about two years ago in the height of kobit 19. at the time there were really strict limitations of how many people were allowed on set in a small location for how long so I decided to go really easy one-man band with one camera One microphone and one light since this was only the first out of two shooting locations for the day I also decided to not go for a shotgun microphone setup because that would have required me to bring another c-stand a boom pole a shotgun microphone and would have just wasted a lot of time so I decided to just go with a clip on lavalier microphone so with this out of the way let's talk about the most important thing about this shoot and that was the lighting as I've already mentioned I only brought one light but I also made use of the available light on our location on our camera left we had a huge window with natural light spilling into the room so I positioned my subject that the natural light coming into the room actually acted as a rim light and this helped tremendously separating her from the background even though she was sitting very close to it and it gave her this little bit of silhouette on her arm but also on the chair and separated the chair a little bit more from the couch in the background as our second light source I used a practical that I found on location and I'm a huge fan of using practicals in interview setups or when lighting is seen in general this was just a regular tungsten light bulb with a gold and black shade around it since I couldn't control either the Practical or the sunlight spilling in I had to expose for our scene without using any additional lights so I tried to find a balance where I didn't have to blow out the practical but I could also still use our sunlight spilling in as a rim light with this practical in the background we created several things number one we create color contrast and I will talk about this in detail in a minute number two we created different layers and this is really important and I talked about this in a lot of my videos that we need to create pattern to create depth with this circular light shade we were able to create a light pattern going from Bright to dark to Bright to dark Etc and this helps tremendously to add volume and depth to your scene and as a third effect we created another Rim light and that was useful for separating her even more from the background and usually I only like to go with run Rim light but since we had a motivation for both of our rim lights the window on the left side as well as the Practical on the right side and she was sitting so close to our background that I really felt the need for separating her even more I think we could actually get away with it so now let's talk about our key light in a lot of scenarios I like to go for something that's called a Rembrandt lighting and that means we place our key light in a 45 degree angle towards our subject and with this we get this really nice highlights to Shadow roll off creating this little triangle of Light On the Dark Side of our subject and this is also what I'm using for this talking head setup but since this was a beauty commercial especially focusing on skin care I decided to go with something called a beauty or butterfly lighting and in order to achieve this we boom our light source way up high above our subject in around a 30 to 45 degree angle and here we need to be careful to not go too top heavy because that way we could create unwanted Shadows under her eyes and an indicator that we did a good job is when the shadow under her nose looks somewhat like a butterfly and this is why it's also called Butterfly lighting so this kind of lighting we achieved two things number one we light her face quite evenly and therefore kinda hide some blemishes and Imperfections and number two we create this nice shadow under her cheekbones thus elevating her cheekbones and creating a really nice Beauty look and accentuating some beauty features especially on female faces another thing to look out for when placing a light source is that we're still catching this highlight because we want that catch light in her eyes to make her eyes look Vivid and Lively as my source of key light I use the flexible light matte with a soft box as well as a grit and I think I used a falcon eyes something or the other but this isn't the light that I would recommend anymore so I will link some different options down in the description below and using a flexible light mat for these kind of setups is amazing because it's really lightweight and you can easily boom it up without having to use heavy C stands and it also works in a small location like this one so now the last thing I want to touch on is the color contrast that I mentioned earlier color contrast is also a great way to not only make your image look a little bit more interesting but also to create different layers and therefore more depth in your image our tungsten light is really warm especially with the golden light shade and I would assume that it was around 2700 Kelvin I remember the day being very overcast and rainy so we had a really diffused sunlight coming in from the window on our camera left and I assume it was around 7000 Kelvin so therefore we had a really cool light on our camera left and in contrast we had a really warm tungsten light on our camera right I set my camera's white balance to 5600 Kelvin and that was also the color temperature that I chose for my key light this way the light on the skin is perceived as neutral and white but we're still creating a lot of color contrast with the cool light spilling in on our camera left and the really warm Glide in contrast on the right side of our image and with this color contrast we're not only making our image look a bit more interesting but we also add some depth and volume to our shot so now is our last step on our cinematography breakdown let's briefly talk about the color grain I shot everything in the film or flat profile whatever the flat profile is called on the Blackmagic pocket 6K and as our first step I added a color correction meaning I added some contrast leveled out the exposure and added some saturation in I exposed mostly for the background to not blow out either the Practical or the window on our camera left and then I added a shape mask to bring up the exposure where she was sitting and as a last step I added one of my costume Luts from the Blackmagic Lut pack and this one was called Bluebird and if you're interested I will link them down in the description below for you to check out so that was it that was my cinematography breakdown of this interview setup where we had a small location I only brought one light and we leveraged the available light on location if you're interested in diving way deeper into the whole topic of creating cinematic interviews I'm releasing a full master class on how to shoot interviews from audio to lighting to storytelling everything in the very near future so make sure to subscribe to the channel to not miss it and on one of our next breakdowns we will do the exact opposite from this shoot where we will break down a big commercial campaign that we shot with lots of Lights in a really cool location so make sure to hit that subscribe button and I will see you on the next one

Channel: Damien Cooper

Views: 44,191

Keywords: cinematic lighting, lighting tutorial, how to, filmmaking tutorial, 3 point lighting, interview lighting, cinematic film look, how to light a video, cinematic lighting setup, cinematic lighting techniques, how to make your videos more cinematic, lighting tips, talking head, lighting in small spaces, interview on a budget, budget interview, lighting hacks, damien cooper

Id: vN6J5wHm_e4

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2023