For my thirteenth reflection I have decided to look into what makes a “believable” lighting setup on small scale productions. I have discovered first-hand just how important ‘motivation’ is in lighting (as well as in almost every other facet of filmmaking).

The first time I encountered this was a few months ago when creating a short educational video for my workplace. The room we were filming in had several windows that were letting sunlight in. This meant that the teacher was backlight, and quite underexposed compared top the floor and walls behind her. In hopes of fixing this problem, I decided to use an LED panel to introduce a key light on the teacher’s face. Turns out, the solution wouldn’t be that simple.

The key light I had introduced made her face look quite unnatural. I soon realised, this was because the largest background window was on the right of the frame, yet I was lighting her from the left of frame. This meant that the shadows were directed in the opposite direction as the natural shadows caused by the windows. As soon as I moved the key light from camera left to camera right, I got a much more useable result. This is what I mean when I’m talking about motivation. Even though it was a 3D space, where the windows were clearly far behind our talent, the fact the the light was coming from right to left was enough to make it look believable. The windows were still quite bright, but I could adjust my exposure enough to make sure they weren’t completely blown out. I’d usually be a proponent of moving our camera and chaining the background, but that wasn’t possible in this situation.

I’m probably reducing the complexity of this whole issue, but this is just my observations on what worked and did not work for a quick and easy lighting setup.

To expand on this, while setting up lighting for a music video shoot, one particular shot required the camera (which was placed in the centre of a room) to be panned 360 degrees. This meant that we had to have a consistent level of light across the whole room. We were shooting during the day, and the side of the room opposite the windows was significantly darker than the side with windows. Obviously because of the 360° coverage we were limited by what we could do with our lighting set up, as we had to make sure there were no visible fixtures. To add to the problem, we were shooting with a super-wide lens, and both the floor and ceiling were in frame.

At first I tried hiding LED bars in the corners of the room, however, this looked awfully strange, due the fact the light was seemingly coming out of nowhere. This was clearly not an option. I then tried bouncing a LED Fresnel light off the roof, to increase the general illumination of the room, but it looked strange that the ceiling was brighter than the walls (as the main light source was the windows). We had quite the problem on our hands.

Eventually I figured out we would need to have a “motivation” for our light sources. I decided to try hiding the LED bars again, but this time, I lay them flat, putting a small lampshade on top of each one. This lampshade was enough to make the lighting setup looks believable. No longer was the light seemingly “coming out of nowhere”, and instead it appeared that there were small table lights that were illuminating that side of the room (even though this was far from the truth).

Clearly I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to lighting, but with every job I start to get a little bit more insight into what does and does not work. If I keep this up, eventually I may have half a clue.