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This is PH Yard here. Inviting all to join this discussion about lighting scenes.
So, my workflow comes from treating light as a story tool. Hence, light is a slave to composition and thus the composition gets chosen first. The composition is a slave to the story, so have a story ready. Thus obviously: if you change the story you change the composition, if you change the composition you change the scene's lights setup. Again: if you change the composition you change the scene's lights setup - so, light to a composition.
For this tutorial's story those twins are gonna get their door rung by a naked stranger. Hence, the composition is from home out, putting us into the shoes of the twins to focus on their guest. The map comes with good "practical lights" (the light sources native to the scene such as lit windows and street lights). The person that set up the map knew what he was doing, and did a really good job.
With subjects, story, composition, and the practicals in place, we switch to the actual lighting workflow:
Step 1: disable the camera light in the F5 menu, set up the lights folder. We'll be adding lights as needed:
- to fill subjects with enough lights so a viewer could see details of their clothing
- to add rim light so the subjects are separated from the environment
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Our starting setup, with all the lights, but the practicals, off. No idea what those lights will look like, but that's the algorithm.
Step 2: keep lighting each character to meet the following criteria:
- enough fill light? The criteria here: barely bright to see details in clothes.
- enough rim light? The criteria here: confidently bright line separating character from the environment.
There are schools and practices for criteria, which are further divided by production's genre: comedy, horror, etc, etc. To cut through the chatter and noise, imagine that you are on a budget and you have 2 lights per character: one fill, one rim. The light stand heights are fixed around just above the subject heads. So you keep it simple, by the book:
- The hosts get their fill light first. Criteria: if you don't have time for anything else, and the director is about to yell "action", you must get the fill on the hosts:
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The fill light on the hosts comes from the most reasonable direction - from the hallway. You put a spotlight into the hallway, direction out and slightly down, adjust for brightness and temperature. This looks good enough already and technically you can capture this scene and move on. Since for a relatively little effort we can improve on what we have let's take a few more steps: separate the subjects from the surrounding using rim lights.
Step 3:
Now each character gets a slight rim to their side. We keep it simple and rim only one side. One photographer for Playboy bragged he brings 56 lights to the set and uses at least 30 of those as rim lights -- just so you can see how far you can go with it.
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Now, the brain doesn't see the rim light at all - most people never question where this light comes from so never have to explain or justify your rim light. But since most people are used to see this light in all professional productions, lack of this light screams "amateurs".
Technically, we are really done after "step 3".
Step 4:
In the beginning of this post I wrote about light being a story tool. So, we take a "key" light and throw emphasis on what our story actually is about. In this case the story is the stranger.
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We emphasize her with a key. Naturally you can have more than 1 key light: this has dilution effect on the scene. One could make an argument that this key light is a fill light held to a different criteria. Well, since the purpose of the light is not to show the details but to show a key element of the scene, the light is a key light.
Now, let's talk about the technical aspects of the lights used:
- for the scene setups use spot lights. In the HS2-context they show better resolution.
- scene's fill light has low intensity
- scene's rim lights have high intensity
- all spot lights are wide enough just to cover the subject with their spot from head to toe. For the same reason the lights are relatively far away from the subjects - the further they are, the smaller the angle, thus smaller footprint. The only exception is the key on the guest - that one is super close to her to avoid burn effect on the fence.
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Here is the scene and the actresses so you can check light's effects by clicking them on/off.
Finally, light setups require weekly practice, so, the more you do, the better you get.
Any questions - let me know.