Lighting

If you are just trying out lighting effects for your first movie, use this guide to get you started.

Lighting helps to:

• Pick out relevant details and figures in a scene.
• Tell the audience what you as director prioritise within a shot, and therefore the story.
• Establish a set of values to what we are seeing, by throwing more and less light on the elements in a scene.
• Enforce emotional pull in a scene, heightening mood and atmosphere.
• Allow the camera to see properly, on a technical level
• Allow you to create a look for the film.

Automatic camera features: why you don’t need them

Your biggest enemy on the camcorder is probably the automatic setting. This is useful for some conditions but on the whole you cannot rely on it to deliver when it comes to creative filmmaking- it’s the fast food of lighting. Since the camera fills in the frame if it doesn’t see amount of light it would like, it is better to have a camera with manual override to switch off this feature - which the vast majority do. This means you can set the lighting yourself and be more creative about what you record. As an example, you may want to shoot a scene in which a group of people are in a room, with windows behind them with bright sunlight flooding in. On auto, the camera simply cancels out some of the sunlight, rendering the figures dark beyond all recognition, the sunlight just about right. But you may want the scene to be over-exposed (too much light coming in) in the windows because that gives a certain feel to the scene, and in any case is the only sure way to still see the figures. Automatic wants to do it the way the manufacturers handbook says but manual allows you to do it your way.

Iris and light

Just as with the human eye, the camera has a small hole at the front of the lens which controls how much light is allowed in. In bright conditions, it closes slightly to block some out, while in darker conditions it opens to make more of what little light there is. On a technical level, the iris is important in stopping the inner workings of the camera from being damaged by too much sunlight, just as does the human iris. Too much light also stops the camera from reading colour correctly. But like other features on the camera, we can use the iris creatively. Allowing too much light, or restricting light, can be useful ways of adding atmosphere to a scene.

Colour temperature

Something else that video cameras, particularly at the lower end, are not good at is balancing the colours it sees which is why it has a white balance feature which helps it take out the ‘cast’ of a particular lighting condition, that is, the particular colours given off by most artificial light. The human eye performs a similar routine every time you enter a new environment. A room lit by a domestic light-bulb, for instance, will not give off true light in the way we think of daylight, but instead is tinted by orange. This can play havoc with your film so we need either to use light that does not give off unwanted colours, or adjust the camera to offset what it sees.

• Good studio lighting
• Use lamps
• Use lighting to help you with composition
• Use contrast
• Don’t over-light
• Use shadow

Use lamps

Realism is often the aim of a filmmaker. But you don’t get realistic lighting by using just what is around naturally. If the camera was as sophisticated as the human eye then you could do this, but you have to help a camera to see as we see. This involves using additional light, whether you are outside in natural daylight, or in what seems to be well-lit room. The level of light is not really the issue here; it is about directing the light, altering the intensity of it and removing it from some areas. Lamps will help you with this, but you don’t necessarily have to go out and spend half your budget on the full range. Like everything, there are ways of using fewer.

Basic lamp technique

The basic aim of using lamps is to:

• Pick out the primary object in a scene (known as the Key Light)
• Reduce some of the harshness of the key light with small, softer lights (known as Fill Light)
• Lift the background to increase depth and separate the main figure from it (known as the Background light).