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HOW-TO, Techniques, & Best Practices Channel
There is No Such Thing as Video Lighting
By M. David Mullen, ASC
posted Oct 30, 2008, 11:59 |
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M. David Mullen, ASC has earned two Independent Spirit Award nominations for best cinematography, for Twin Falls Idaho in 1999 and for Northfork in 2003. Photographing over thirty-five films, his filmography includes Assassination of a High School President (2008), Big Love (2007), The Astronaut Farmer (2007), Solstice (2006), and Akeelah and the Bee (2006).
There is No Such Thing as Video Lighting
Nor DV lighting, digital lighting, HD lighting � anymore than there is Fuji
lighting versus Kodak lighting. I mean, what exactly is �film
lighting� when that term covers the look of movies from Singin� in the Rain to Seven?
Learning to light is one of the biggest challenges
for the beginning filmmaker and involves
developing three separate skills: (1) the ability to
see, to be sensitive to the artistic possibilities of
natural light and available artificial illumination;
(2) the ability to imagine how lighting can
transform a location or set; and (3) the ability to
tell a story in images.
You develop the first skill, using natural and artificial light,
through observation of the world around you and by
exercising your own inherent visual taste. You will begin to
see how the shade in daytime is cooler in tone than the
direct sunlight, or how a shiny piece of furniture or flooring
may reflect the blue in the sky seen through a window, or
how sunlight through leaves creates out-of-focus circular
patterns on the ground. You�ll notice how light reflects and
bounces off of surfaces in rooms to create secondary sources
on objects. You�ll become sensitive to color temperatures of
different sources of light.
It can be helpful to take digital or film photographs of
these natural lighting effects that catch your eye so that you
will begin to understand how they will be reproduced when
you are shooting. You may also find it informative to carry
around a light meter and check the levels and the contrast
range of natural lighting effects.
In terms of developing your visual imagination (without
which there is little reason to become a visual artist!) it helps
to surround yourself with art, study the light and colors of
paintings, and study the lighting in movies that you respond
emotionally to. It even helps to read literature and constantly visualize what you are reading as if it were a
movie playing in your head.
Filmmaking often involves these two methods of �seeing.�
Firstly, seeing the real world and capturing it (perhaps with
some creative alterations) and secondly, seeing an image in
one�s mind and reproducing it. So when shooting on a
location with a certain amount of available light, you
envision how you can take advantage of this natural light
while also visualizing what the location would look like if
you started from scratch and provided all the light yourself.
Often what you end up doing is a combination of these two
seemingly opposite approaches � capturing natural light
while enhancing certain aspects of it, if not outright
recreating it.
But the overriding concern is with the story, which will
drive your decisions. The challenge may involve a point of
logic, for example, a scene may need to be set as the sun is
obviously going below the horizon. (Maybe you�re making a
vampire movie, and this is an important element of the
suspense of the scene.) Or perhaps the story is set during a
power black-out, and the characters only have flashlights
and candles for illumination. But beyond story logic, the
true challenge is how to visually support the emotional
undertones of the scene. Perhaps you need to create a
feeling of dread or alienation, or suggest the warmth and
safety of a family, or the dangerous passion of a romance. In
fact, you may need to create a logical source of light for the
scene that actually is there more for the emotional tone it
creates. An example is in the Hitchcock movie, Vertigo,
where you have a hotel room lit by a green neon sign
outside the window. The green light is there for symbolic
reasons, evoking the memory of a �dead� character, but it
has been logically motivated.
Now some people will say that video lighting is different
than film lighting because of the narrower contrast range that video can handle. But this is only true in fairly
insignificant ways. Obviously, if you wanted the scene to
look like a painting by Vermeer with a room lit by soft
daylight through a large window, you�d use a big, soft light
coming through that window � regardless of whether you
were shooting video or film. The only difference is that with
video, you may have to expose more for the brightest
highlights and perhaps adjust your fill light to compensate.
But if you were shooting reversal film, or bleach-bypassed
film, you�d also be adjusting your contrast range, so it�s not
particularly a video-versus-film issue. The only particular
lighting tricks that work more obviously with film and less
well with video involve using large amounts of
overexposure, combined with relying heavily on the latitude
of color negative to hold detail in the brightest areas of the
frame. But conversely, sometimes digital cameras handle
lighting tricks better and involve a lot of very soft but
underexposed light � a low-level murky look, which can
make an image look somewhat mushy and grainy on some
film stocks.
Often when someone says they don�t know how to light a
scene, it�s because they haven�t exercised their imagination
on how the scene should look � not because they don�t have
the right technical knowledge. Technical knowledge is only
a tool to execute a creative idea. It can�t supply that idea,
only you can. Once you have an image in your mind, you
can answer half the questions about the lighting yourself, in
terms of the color, direction, and texture of the light.
My ultimate advice is to study good lighting wherever you
find it � in real life, in movies, in paintings, and in
photography, regardless of whether you are shooting with a
cheap consumer DV camera or a 35mm Panaflex. I think
you�ll find that even in the most expensive movies ever
made, the best-lit moments often use the simplest lighting
technique. It may even be a face lit by a ten-dollar Chinese
lantern from an import store. So don�t feel that to learn how
to light for DV, you need to limit yourself to studying other
movies shot on DV. Not when you may also find inspiration
by stepping out of your door and looking around, or by
going to an art museum, or by watching your favorite movie
on DVD.
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