The Softest Hollywood Lighting Setups | 3 Easy Tricks

most of the reason why you're doing a stop play in the first place because you want that rap by adding little points of interest you can really kind of like break up a frame and hopefully make it more cinematic yeah you're rolling your eyes to that word yo what is going on indie mogul my name is ted and today we are talking about how to get that super creamy hollywood soft lighting and today we'll be talking about two different styles of lighting that i think a lot of people even a lot of experienced people don't know about and we're going to talk about how to make a shot that looks like this this so we're going to do this today starting off with my buddy over here casey macbeth getting here what's up dude what's up man it's happy to be here yeah good to see you so uh casey when we were starting off with a lighting setup i think that lighting stuff that we just showed is a setup that a lot of people have seen before yeah it's pretty typical i mean you see it everywhere because it's a very quick way to go but there's a lot more that you can do to kind of nuance and finesse your lighting to really kind of take it through several stages the only thing we're going to change today is the lighting so let's start with the basics how do we make a shot that looks like this look a little bit better well i mean the main things you have to think about are you know the lights that you want to have so i mean the way we typically talk about that in filmmaking is you have your fill light your key light back lights and background lights so we're just trying to really balance the exposure of everything in a scene to make it something that we want to see so we want to really highlight the subject we want to make them look attractive we want to bring a lot of shape to their face but at the same time we don't want the background to be too distracting but we do want to be attractive so it's not like really bland and boring and there's a lot of ways you can do that first step is i don't know what light you're working with at home but regardless of what light you're working with it probably is not as bad as these lights these lights are like industrial warehouse lights they're bad they're ugly they're not good so uh step number one no matter where you are we'll probably turn off the lights right yeah you i mean the first thing that anybody wants to do is whatever location you're in is find what's bad and reduce it and remove it okay so starting off step number one let's do this i'm going to turn off the lights okay okay cool here we go let's just see real quick what that looks like in the camera okay so right now we've got a middling amount of fill light on you so it actually doesn't look bad if you were looking for a front uh front side key and you're getting this really cool kind of like light here in the background but there's some stuff we want to change like if you take a look at the frame on the left side and the right side it's really dark and of course with your face kind of swimming in shadows on the far side it doesn't really look like anything every situation will be different but unless i really need to kind of like flatten somebody's skin if they're a little bit older or if they're maybe somebody who wants to look a little bit more young you might use a frontside key but i typically will try to go for a far side key just to kind of bring in some more depth and definition to the thing so we've got a light here that we've already kind of like pre-positioned so let me turn that one on just to start seeing what you look like okay so this right here is what daylight looks like when it's coming in through the windows as you can see in the back there it's kind of filling up the room and when i'm using a daylight balanced light it doesn't look bad right this looks okay this is usable but we're trying to go for cinematic here so if we're going for cinematic here we're going to try to play with the colors a little bit more so let's see instead what it looks like when we white balance the 3200 kelvin which is going to make everything else in the room bluer but we're going to change our light to be tungsten as well too and that's going to make the lights on me look normal but everything else is going to have this cinematic blue quality so let's take a look what it looks like so uh casey what else can we do to make this log even better well i mean there's there's a lot we can do i think the main thing that stuck out to me while we were just looking at that frame right there is just how kind of like dark the background looks especially off to the sides so i would say this is definitely the time to start working in the practicals by adding little points of interest you can really kind of like break up a frame make it more complex make it more interesting okay cool well so we've kind of like undone ourselves so now these are just like really bright and adding a lot to the scene um and you know they're really kind of drawing the eye away if we can dim them or you know use something to knock them down a bit okay so we are going to use dimmers of course we have these we've talked about these before they're like eight dollars at home depot there's no reason why you shouldn't have them in your kits so yeah we're gonna do is we're gonna dim back and kind of peel back these practicals right okay but that looks pretty good i like that the only thing that i'm not loving is you're getting a lot of blue light on your face from the window it's just kind of a little odd i don't want to close off the window because then we lose a lot of the background light so if we can just individually tackle your fill from the window that'd be great so if we can take something like like one of these guys or a flag or even a jacket you know like on a coat hanger or something okay so we are using this this is called foam core you can buy it at any craft store anywhere that's actually doing a pretty good job can you show me what the frame looks like here we have now this setup here it looks pretty good what else can we do here i guess the big thing now is just it looks a little two-dimensional just because you don't really have a lot of depth to you and like the main thing that you start using to like bring like a three-dimensional quality to the lighting is to start putting lights the other direction so i think a backlight is gonna really help not only separate you from the frame but just also just make it feel like just more rich lively and natural especially for hairs it'll just kind of turn into a dark clump and so when you can bring some light into it you can start seeing like like nuances and texture nuances in color okay sounds good so how do we do that we add a light okay let's do it tada you get a little light yeah back at the frame now real quick before we continue i want to talk real quick about today's sponsor and that is storyblocks now unless you've been hiding under a rock recently it's kind of hard to go 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though is how do we make our soft light look even better than what i think a lot of people are using so again this is enough but if you want to get one step further what else can we do the thing that i always talk to people about when i think of like improving the quality of lighting i think increasing the size of your light is really important because that can further increase the softness it can further increase the wrap like this obviously looks nice but it it screams artificial anything that feels like soft but it's not that large can feel a little bit like it's coming from a film light yeah so like the more directional a light appears the more artificial it appears gotcha so how do we make our lights and our soft light look a little bit better a little more realistic and less directional um i think the first thing to do would be to increase the size so i mean there's a lot of ways to do that even with the setup we have right now we can put some diffusion in front of that to make it a larger source what does that look like i don't know it's probably really ugly let's see oh nuclear i've actually seen a lot of fashion shoots use this because they you know when um when you have models that aren't me and have beautiful perfect skin having hard lights actually great because oh yeah blast hard light into their face and they have zero imperfections so it's just like it almost makes them look that much more beautiful but for ugly people like me you need you gotta give me some diffusion i think you're just fishing some help so uh we will set this up you said this is a six by six frame yeah and you know what we're indoors there's no wind um there's not a lot of like things moving around so we don't need to set up the whole thing we can actually just do what i call a t-bone okay i mean everybody calls it that i just also call it that [Laughter] um so the thing that i was thinking is i do have larger sheets of fabric diffusion i mean you could use a shower curtain you could use bed sheets okay okay there we go and now we've got a softer source so that's pretty cool this light the quality that's hitting me is now a lot softer than what we were looking at before yeah the shadows on your face are a lot softer you're getting a lot more wraparound of the light which is kind of nice and the thing that i really like um is you have a larger section of your face that's kind of like a mid tone as opposed to before when it was just kind of hard here dark hair very very skinny middle part here so there's more of a wrap okay so this looks really nice actually you don't need a soft box for this you can just use any piece of fabric or anything like that that you have we literally have bed sheets here that we could also use do you want to use a bed sheet real quick might as well i'll show you a bed sheet all right we'll show you a benchy one second i got a bed sheet just just wait hold on just for you indie mogulars that complain that we use too much gear here's a bed sheet this is from ikea it cost me like ten dollars uh we can use this we can hang this in the same t-bar way that we had before and this will actually give us probably a pretty similar quality of light so let's show you what that looks like alrighty so bed sheet still looking pretty decent actually that looks really nice yeah damn it looks really good it almost looks nicer than the other stuff because it's thicker this is the reason why people use fabrics like muslin and stuff like that because when the light punches through it's going to travel a really short distance it's going to be super duper creamy and soft and then it's just going to fall off and it's not going to hit the background stuff like that if you take a look at this diffusion you can see what the actual light looks like so we've got you know obviously a really hot spot right here and then you've got like a dimmer area kind of all around it so technically the shape of your light is kind of similar like you've got a somewhat harder source here not that hard because it's obviously like you know a foot and a half across and then you've got this area that's kind of doing another softening effect but what we could do is we could go to more of a book light setup to get a much more even output all across here which would again increase the softness so a book light is where you're taking a light you're reflecting it off a bounce source and then you're then diffusing the bounced light through some diffusion so a book light is a way to try to better fill a diffusion frame uniformly so it's as soft as possible so instead of just light diffusion subject it's light bounce diffusion subject correct got it yeah it's like a book you got two little slides on it and it just bounces in between there all right let's do this we're going to need something like this this is called platypus if you don't know what this is do a video about that so and so now this is what it looks like and we have now a large light that's not only large so it makes it softer but it is also even across the actual light you can shoot that we'll see that right here this actually makes it look a little bit more even on my face too so two ways to soften the light softening its size softening it consistency you're gonna have a lot of spillover into your set just from the bounce you're also gonna have a lot of spill coming from here technically the energy from the light has lost a lot of itself so it's not going to be too crazy coming from here so we can control this a lot just by a cider just some foam core or a flag or any sort of scrap duvetyne or any black material to kind of help keep light from passing around from there okay we've got a book light it looks pretty good we are super soft now yeah what's the second setup that we're talking about today the third setup is a bit of a bigger setup so it can be a little bit more difficult to handle but it is fantastic when you're shooting people moving around in large locations it's great if you want to really kind of bring out like the attractive qualities of somebody and it's great if you want something to look incredibly natural and that is a cove light and that's something that was really kind of like made famous by roger deakins he's a fantastic yeah so what he does with this cove light is has a light source that wraps a decent way around somebody you know up to 90 degrees and what that can do especially if there's a natural gradation across it in output is you'll get this really attractive kind of quality of light as it falls off around the face without like a distinct shadow area just kind of naturally goes there how do we get this set up so the way i was kind of thinking about it is i did bring these foam cores that i have they're about eight feet long we can put those horizontal we can use stands to put one here kind of the edge of where our frame is yeah bend it a little bit right just bend it i don't care and then bring the other one around back behind the camera and then by using a light on this side shine into it i think and i hope that should give us what we're looking for what'd you think oh it's nice looks pretty darn good yeah i like it so feels natural not only is this soft light because it's very large but it's also a soft light because it's very consistent across the board this looks beautiful man this is like a perfect kind of hollywood hollywood soft light i'm digging it i dig it i wish i could do it more often i know i wish we could do it more often [Music] okay so now guys you have a couple of different ways to understand soft lighting and if you ask these questions which we get a lot about how do i make my lighting look like xyz marvel movie we can't tell you how to do that because there's a million ways to light this but these are some traditional cinematic lighting techniques that you can now employ you now understand soft lighting and case if people have questions can they ask you these as well yeah absolutely if you guys want to leave them in the comments i usually monitor those for a couple of weeks because i know they kind of always seem to trickle in so absolutely absolutely also thank you to storyblocks for sponsoring this video unlock an unlimited library of footage by checking out storyblocks.com indie mogul leave your questions down below we're gonna be there answering comments as well but other than that indie mogul that is it for me this is the show thank you so much for watching and of course we will catch you guys next time [Music] i thought we were going to just like gently allow it to curve oh is that the plan was it really every crease in it is a crease in my soul

Channel: Indy Mogul

Views: 481,257

Keywords: cinematic, hollywood, soft lighting, quality, aputure, light dome, soft box, book light, cove light, butterfly frame, tips & tricks, cinematography, director of photography, gaffer, lighting scheme, rigging, grip and electric, YouTube studio, interviews, corporate video, promotion, canon, nikon, dslr, filmmaking, studio, photography, highlights and shadows, adobe lightroom, adobe premiere, photoshop, best lighting, narrative film, documentary film

Id: XZGpDs4M6HQ

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020