Shaping Light for Video in the Age of LEDs

A Practical Guide to the Art and Craft of Lighting

Alan Steinheimer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367819132
• eBook ISBN: 9781000177725
• Subtopic: Film & Video

A practical, hands-on guide to lighting for video, this book explores how LEDs are changing the aesthetics of lighting and provides students with an indispensable guide to the everyday techniques required to produce professional-quality lighting in the age of LEDs and wireless control options.

The book focuses on first-hand application of technical knowledge, beginning with simple lighting setups and progressing to more complicated scenarios, and features accompanying diagrams, illustrations and case studies to demonstrate their real-world application. Key topics covered include basic three-point lighting, lighting moving actors, set lighting and exposure, instrument selection, bringing style to your lighting, color temperature and the Kelvin scale, exterior lighting, lighting categories and genres, green-screen techniques, money and budgeting, and electricity and electrical distribution. The book also provides guidance on career paths including what a grip does, case studies with photos and diagrams, and an extensive glossary of set terminology to introduce students to the language of filmmaking.

A must-have resource for film and media production students taking classes in lighting and/or cinematography.

CHAPTER ONE

Why we light

The evolution of motion-picture lighting

Today’s video cameras are so fast that it is entirely possible to shoot in true vérité style with available light. For some documentaries, in which lighting would be too intrusive, this is a major breakthrough. However, most productions can still benefit from some sort of lighting design sensibility. To put it bluntly, many YouTube videos look like crap. Even the most intriguing, witty, outrageous, and engaging video loses its impact if it has poor lighting.

Designing lighting draws you into the craft, art, and science of film and video making. It is a marriage of aesthetics to practicality. Controlling light for the purpose of capturing images has a long history. Leonardo da Vinci and his camera obscura were the likely origins of photographic reproduction. Although da Vinci described the camera obscura in a notebook in 1502, the first know public drawing was published in 1545.

Figure 1.1The oldest-known published drawing of a camera obscura from 1545 showing how to study a solar eclipse.

Figure 1.2An artist drawing from life with a circa 1850 camera obscura. From a 19^th-century dictionary illustration.

Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and you will find an enormous variety of visual imagery, carefully designed and presented to sell products and viewpoints, and to tell stories. Nowadays I see great lighting in all genres. HBO, Netflix and Amazon have pushed out even the artistic boundaries of the TV series.

I love the intersection of aesthetics and machinery. My goal in this book is to share techniques, practical tips, workplace philosophy, and terminology for manipulating light to create images. My intent is to present lighting concepts in digestible chunks to allow production personnel to tool up for more intelligent and consciously designed lighting.

Several years ago I might have included “film” in the title of this book, but I haven’t lit a film set in years. Video cameras have replaced film cameras even in major movie productions. The theory and techniques are still the same, so if you’re looking for film lighting know-how, everything you’ll read here still applies. Film lighting precedes video by 50–60 years. The apprentice-based learning style that dominated film production worked well for film shoots, but when the TV age began it was too inflexible for the multiple levels of quality inherent in video production. Filmmaking no longer requires actual film, as evidenced by director Steve Soderbergh recently shooting an entire feature on a phone.

Think of filmmaking as a medium with a specific language and nearly infinite range of methods for conveying mood and content through lighting. Hollywood features use lighting to enhance feeling and story line, elevating ordinary life into a symbolic drama of the human condition. Like any language you can continue to improve your lexicon and add to your bag of techniques. Every single production day calls for finding the lighting style best suited to your available equipment, overall aesthetic, available crew, and the time given to create it.

The LED revolution

The first LEDs were prone to a green tint, which wasn’t great for skin tones. Many commercial LEDs in buildings and cheaper, older film LED lights still exhibit a green tint. But now on my average shoot 75% of the instruments are LED, and some are 100%. On the issue of accurate color rendition most DPs (Directors of Photography) have come to accept a 92+ CRI (Color Rendering Index) as acceptable. The main impediment for beginners is the cost: LEDs cost more to buy and to rent. Lesser-known brands such as Westcott, Aputure, Dracast, and Fiilex are starting to fill out product lines that hit a “prosumer” middle-market price. Old-line companies such as ARRI, Mole, Lite Panels, Cineo, LiteGear, Dedo, and Astera will continue to put out the expensive top of the line products I prefer. Are these lights better? Generally yes, but like in other areas of film production you might be paying 50% more for the final 10% improvement factor. I buy and use top-end lights such as ARRI because my upper-end corporate clients expect it and are willing to pay for it. There are other solutions, and some of them are not even LEDs, so don’t despair if you are a student still eating Top Ramen regularly.

Working with what you have

If there is a Zen aspect to lighting for filmmaking it is all about making do with what equipment you have available. Lots of LEDs? – great! A box of Kinos – make the film magic with those fixtures. I lit many sets for 15+ years with Kino Flos. I still do tungsten shoots on stages; daylight stage shoots are prohibitively expensive unless it is a small set.

If you are a student get familiar with whatever lights are accessible. Resist the temptation to buy too early. Better to try out a variety of luminaires and find what works best. When you are working on student productions or indie projects never pay list price, instead haggle and make offers. Even with 30 years in filmmaking I am still regularly making deals. This art form is one of the most expensive to produce.

Aspirations and reality

Even the film crews working on masterpieces such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Blade Runner (1982), and the Terminator series probably had moments of “what the heck are we doing?” Behind every great vision there is some gritty reality to get a film made. Try to harmonize the vision of art with the money and gear available. Some of the best short films I have seen were brilliantly simple:

•A student film in New York City consisting of a continual loop of a man’s hands washing with soap with a voice-over rationalizing his money-grubbing real estate schemes and victim-blaming the people he was evicting to make way for higher rents.

•A video short by well-known dog photographer William Wegman with his Weimaraner Man Ray. The camera is on the ground facing a tall glass of milk, the dog enters frame, and quickly starts drinking. Towards the end his tongue becomes unbelievably elongated. The dog finally knocks the glass over and finishes off the spilled milk. It embodied the striving for food and ridiculous nature of our rush for satisfaction while providing some entertaining comic relief.

On occasion I am hired on student productions, which are characterized by two common features: too much ambition and too little collaboration. Often one or two strong personalities drive the entire enterprise, which can lead to train wrecks and failed projects. The great joy of film production is collaboration. It takes years to master the art of contributing without too much ego, and being able to absorb the flow and direction of a production and improve upon it.

There are popular buzzwords and trends that can enslave you – beware! There is no need to shoot 4k for an indie YouTube video. You don’t need LED lights on every shoot. Dolly moves on track are expensive; Dana dolly moves are cheap. Learn to innovate and above all work with what you have. Keep your dreams but keep an eye on reality and realize that every film is a compromise. When I read Masters of Light (1984, 2013) about feature DPs I was struck by how many times they said they had to improvise and make do even though millions of dollars were being spent for the production!

Remember your first thought or plan may not be the best one. Practice collaboration and find like-minded people to populate your sets. Adjust the scope of production to the budget and the gear available. Make the compromises needed to finish the project and you’ll have started on a long career in filmmaking.

For a sobering view of what can go wrong on movie sets every student should watch Burden of Dreams (1982) by Les Blank about the making of Fitzcarraldo (1982), as well as Hearts of Darkness (1991) and Lost in La Mancha (2002).

CHAPTER TWO

Lighting basics

As human beings, our interactions with each other revolve around interpreting facial expressions and understanding the complex emotions they reveal. Therefore, it’s no surprise that lighting human faces is crucial to controlling the aesthetics and impact of your production. When you look at most TV and film, you will find a large percentage of scenes are devoted to close-ups of people’s faces. Learning how to light faces effectively is the lighting student’s first priority. Fortunately this task can be accomplished with only a few basic pieces of equipment.

Three-point lighting

The most basic soup of lighting has three lights: key, fill, and backlight. A more modern interpretation of the troika might swap edge light for the backlight. The key light is usually defined as the brightest light falling on the subject’s head or on an object in product lighting. Occasionally the backlight or edge light can be the brightest light depending on the desired effect, e.g., in a dramatic or feature film as opposed to a straightforward interview scenario. For the moment, however, we’ll discuss lighting for an ordinary talking head (an interview subject or spokesperson). In two simple diagrams (figs. 2.5 and 2.35) you can see that the key light, backlight, and edge light have zones of possible positions. There is no one spot that is perfect; every interview subject is unique and the mood and intent of the film will dictate lighting as much as the actual physical skull and hair of the talking head.

Often the location of the key light is dictated by the set location. There may be physical limitations on the placement of lights or you may need to consider motivating sources. Often we swap the key side when shooting a collection of interviews just to introduce variety to the framing and avoid repetition.

In most interviews the key light is the brightest light and thus usually the brightest or biggest luminaire. Frequently the key is diffused and softened to render a more pleasing port...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Why we light
• C2HAPTER TWO Lighting basics
• CHAPTER THREE Grip equipment basics
• CHAPTER FOUR Electricity
• CHAPTER FIVE Exposure and compression
• CHAPTER SIX Color temperature, the Kelvin scale, and gels
• CHAPTER SEVEN Refining portrait lighting and cross keying
• CHAPTER EIGHT Planning for motion on set
• CHAPTER NINE Background lighting
• CHAPTER TEN Choice of lights: 3200K and Kino Flos
• CHAPTER ELEVEN LED lights
• CHAPTER TWELVE HMIs
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN DMX and controlling lights
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN Green and blue screen
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN Daytime exterior lighting
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN Nighttime exteriors
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Types and genres of lighting
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Advanced electrical
• CHAPTER NINETEEN Generators
• CHAPTER TWENTY Advanced gripping
• CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Introducing style to lighting
• CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Set safety
• CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Money vs. aesthetics
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Freelancing
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Case studies #1–5
• Glossary and set vocabulary
• Index