Quick Interview Lighting with LED Panels - Part 1

in this episode we'll talk about interview lighting when i have to work really quickly let's talk about some thoughts for each of the main lights here number one key light with the key light i typically like to use a soft light in this particular case i'm using a gemini one by one from light panels that's going through a soft box which is about two feet by two feet so 24 inches by 24 inches and that is lighting the majority of my face now i'm talking straight into the camera so it's going to look a little bit more like this i usually put it off to at least a 45 degree angle maybe a little bit more to get a little bit of a dramatic look here and to get some rembrant lighting where you get the little triangle of light here on the cheek opposite the light so that's usually a pretty interesting look now when you have the talent looking slightly off camera for an interview like this what i typically like to do is light the far side of the face the face that is farthest away from the camera that adds a little bit more interest and then basically at that point your camera is actually closest to the fill side of the face of the part where you're using the fill light and so that just gives a more interesting dramatic more pleasing look overall let's talk about fill lights fill lights i think in the classic three-point lighting fill lights are horrible they actually are really dangerous because what i find a lot of times is when people start using them they'll put them basically at 45 degrees off to the opposite side of the camera of the key light and they'll be fighting with how much light on the in the fill to use and you'll end up with double shadows where the shadows kind of crisscross underneath person the person's nose or their neck and it's a bad idea my preference for fill light if i'm going to use it and i don't always use it is in this case for example i put the fill light almost right as close to the camera as i can and then i bounce it off of a bounce board and then i can just sort of dial it in and all i'm looking to do there is lift the shadows on the shadow side of the face just a little bit just so it's not completely lost in shadow now with rim lighting or hair lighting or however you approach that i don't often have times to rig up an entire light fly it up behind the talent and bring it down directly on top of their head when i'm doing my corporate videos and so a lot of times i'll do a rim instead i can put a rim on a stand just like we're doing here and just put it off to one side the opposite side of the key light of the person so in this case the rims over here the key lights over here and that just brings some light and i typically like to use a soft light there as well so something in a soft box or a soft panel or anything that i can do to kind of get the light to wrap a little bit i tried not to get it to wrap all the way to the nose just around the side of the face in the back of the head a little bit and that's generally going to work a little bit better for people who are bald as well because a lot of times what you do you don't want to usually typically a hair light on someone who's bald because it just makes this you know really enormous specular highlight and it kind of screams to the world this guy is bald so not usually a look you're going for i think a lot of times the rim light is going to work a little bit better in that situation now for the background light or lights there are a lot of things you can do if you just need something very quick and simple a splash of light often i would say a hard light up on a wall behind the person can really do some interesting things this is where a hard light's generally going to be more interesting and so in this case i'm using a gemini one by one hard so it's a one by one panel that produces a hard light and you can see it creates a little bit of a there's a little bit of a vignette it leaves a pattern on the wall that's a pretty straightforward simple way to do that now there are some other things you can do as well now that particular light's an rgb light and we were able to dial in some purple add some interest some interesting color now if you don't have an rgb light there are still some things you can do in terms of creating interesting color so for example on this shot what we did is we shot with a key light set to white balance of tungsten 3200 kelvin and then what we did is we set the background lights to 5600 kelvin and that's why they appear blue now of course on the camera we set the white balance to 3200 kelvin to match the key light because we want our skin tones to look natural and so that's what you do but because the camera is set to 3200 kelvin it's reading the 5600 kelvin lights as blue and that can be one way to do it or you can do the inverse you can put 55 or 5600 kelvin on the light dial your white balance to daylight and then set the background light to 3200 kelvin and then you get a nice warm background light so you have to think about color as well what are you trying to convey with the piece is it something where you want it to feel kind of warm and it's a feel-good type of thing maybe the background light is 3200 kelvin and the key light is 5600 kelvin would fit that situation a little bit better if you want to do something that is a little bit more maybe technical or you're trying to convey something that is um more impressive something like that that's where you might want to use something that's a little bit more bluish and that's where you would set the key light to 3200 kelvin set your camera's white balance to 3200 kelvin and set the background light to 5600 kelvin that way you'll get that blue in the background now windows can be really tricky and you have to be super careful with windows the problem with windows especially during the daytime and i run into this a lot in the corporate video work in offices is that they can reflect a lot of stuff so you don't want to see a big reflection of all of your equipment in the shot and so you have to be careful about that make sure that the angle at which you're shooting makes it so that you're not getting a reflection of all the equipment in the windows now another thing is at night you will definitely have to be careful about where you put the lights in relation to windows because they will reflect on the windows as well so that can make a big problem for you just something to watch out for we do a lot of corporate interviews and this is a kind of a pretty straightforward way to do that i just want to run through the lights here one by one so i'm going to go ahead and run through and turn all of them off and then we'll bring them back up one by one and then we're gonna turn off the key light oh there's nothing so first off the key light so what we're using here in this particular case is a light panels gemini one by one soft through a soft box it's a dop choice the what's important here are a couple of things number one uh that we have this in very close as you can see on the behind the scenes camera so this is less than a meter from our talent right here we're using a soft box so we make as large a light surface as possible to make it nice and soft and the kind of characteristic of soft is that the larger the surface area that's emitting light is to your talent the softer it will be and the more it will wrap around their face so that's what you're seeing here as it's wrapping around another characteristic that we're doing here is that because she's doing an interview and looking off camera just a little bit here not even 45 degrees what we're doing as well is that we are lighting the far side of her face with that soft light source and we're shooting at the fill side of her face and that just adds a little bit more dimension and interest to the overall lighting design so those are kind of the important characteristics first of all for a talking head slash interview all right now i'm going to go ahead and turn on the hair light we have a light panels gemini 1x1 hard back here with a grid on it and i'm going to pop that on here okay we've done a couple things you can also see that there's this flag here this is just a flag that i've suspended up here with the c-stand and what i'm doing is i'm preventing this light from going straight into the camera lens and creating too much blooming and flare but at the same time we're lighting the back of our talent's head so that we get a little separation and a little bit more dimension you can see here that that light's coming in hitting the back of her hair it's very subtle but it is enough to add just a little bit more dimension all right in this case we're also lighting this little screen back here and in that case i'm just using two astra one by ones a soft one and a hard one you can see once those come up that gives us some light on our backdrop there now i did have to fill a little bit we've got a little kind of credenza or shelf of some sort back there and it kind of created these shapes and i didn't really want those so i've got a couple of rgb lights down here on the floor and i'll just go ahead and pop those on as well all right and those just kind of fill in that a little bit more as well so the uh overall lighting design here so we're shooting at f 2.8 which i wouldn't go any wider on the aperture than that because you're gonna have you're gonna struggle with focus especially if the talent moves much but in this case here we're measuring right yeah right at f 2.8 we're at 23.976 frames per second iso 400 180 degree shutter angle and this light is only at 10 so we have a lot of room there to to punch that up if we needed to um back here i do a reading on these these are just coming through at f1 basically so we want to keep be careful and keep that you know keep that lower but just add an interesting dimension to our backdrop there so hopefully that was helpful for you i hope that gives you some ideas on how you can quickly do three-point lighting or in this case technically we used four lights but the three points of lighting are on me again it's the key the fill and in this case the rim you could also do it as a hair light if you preferred but then of course we added the fourth light back here on the background to add a little more interest if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video talk to you soon [Music] you

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 19,490

Keywords: Audio, sound, video, Lighting, interview, setup, design, lighting design, video lighting, how to, demo, tutorial, LED, Panel, LED panel

Id: nQ0eBkAX6xo

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021