Cinematography Tutorial - Lighting for Darkness
The Challenge
How do you make a scene look dark even though you have to use lights to make sure the audience knows what they’re looking at. This was something I struggled with quite a bit when I was first starting out. I thought that I needed to use very minimal amounts of light because that, of course, looks very dark on camera. And in real life, when we’re standing in a dark space it’s actually dark. There’s not a lot of light.
The problem was that the image in the camera looked terrible. Faces were “muddy,” there was ISO noise everywhere. That’s because SPOILER ALERT our cameras are not human eyeballs. Once I really understood that, the path forward became a lot more clear.
The Solutions
Have you ever heard the phrase “light for you sensor?” It’s a concept that may seem confusing. But if you do just that you’ll start to see a noticeable improvement in your films. Your scenes become crisper, there’s less noise in the dark areas and you’ll be much happier. Watch the video to see what this means and how to do it.
You should also embrace the shadows. And you should create shadows. This is a huge part of letting an audience know that the environment is dark. Because even though there is light on an actor, light on things in the background, light coming in a window, etc. there are also a ton of shadows where light isn’t hitting. It’s this play of light and shadow that denotes something is supposed to be dark.
Gear:
GVM Lite Panel
Godox SL60iid
Sennheiser Boom Mic SKE600
Aputure Accent b7c
