It is important to have good lighting on subjects and to use lighting and color to tell story. I researched different forms of lighting to best fit my storyline and shot-types (moving with a moving subject).
(Content and quotes from research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGpDs4M6HQ)
There are 3 different lights (but really 4):
1. Fill Light - fill up the room, not very directional or focused on anything.
2. Key Light - directional, focused
3. Back Light (aka rim light, hair light, edge light) - the light behind and to the side of the subject, adds depth (3 dimensional as opposed to flat or 2 dimensional). Creates lighting on hair so it isn't a "dark clump." Shows nuances in texture and color.
4. Background Lights (aka practicals) - lights that appear in the shot, are on-screen as opposed to off-screen
Goals: to highlight the subject, keep the background interesting.
Limit bad lighting. So if your location has bad lighting, see if you can turn them off.
Use a front-side key light (light the side of the face closer to the camera) to flat the face, which can help make an older person look younger.
Far-side key lighting is more dramatic (light the side of the face farther from the camera), adds more depth and definition to the subject.
By white-balancing a shot, camera determines one color (that the cinematographer chooses) will be white and then that shifts all the other colors the way the one color shifted to become pure white. (Can make everything warmer or cooler.)
By adding tungsten to the key light, adds orange tones to subject (or different depending on how the white balance changed the shot's colors).
Keep in mind color theory and adjacent and complimentary colors.
Use background lights to break up a frame, make it more complex and interesting.
Use dimmers (very affordable) to dim down lights. (ex- lamps).
Use foam core to cover light from specific sources that isn't wanted.
Increasing size of the light can increase softness and wrap (smooth gradient of light over the subject). The more directional (comes with smaller lights) a light is, the more artificial it looks. Add a diffuser to fix this:
Fashion shoots often use soft-box lights without diffusers to show the smoothness of their skin. Hard lighting can enhance the beauty, but most need diffusion.
Traditional Soft Box/6X6 Diffusion:
Frames are used to hold up diffusion rags. Don't need to set up the whole frame, just a "t-bone," rod on the top holds the diffusion rag (could be a shower curtain, sheet, table cloth etc.) held up by a vertical rod. Can use a 1/2 grid cloth. Increases softness and adds wrap. Increases the section of the subject's face in midtones (in between the deepest shadow and lightest highlight).
Muslin fabric often used to diffuse light because the light travels only a short distance, making the light more creamy and soft and fall off, not hitting the background very hard.
Booklight Setup:
Increases evenness/softness. Take light, reflect it off of a bounce source and reflect the bounced light through diffusion. Better fills a diffusion frame uniformly. (Instead of light, diffusion, subject, it is light, diffusion, bounce, subject).
Cove Light:
*** (Increases the light's angle) Good for shooting people moving around in large locations, brings out the attractive qualities of people. Looks incredibly natural. Wraps a light source around subjects up to 90 degrees and creates a very attractive quality of light as it falls off around the face without a distinct shadow area. Use two light sources coming at slightly different angles and a bounce.
Horizontally position foam cores and bend it to where the one side is at the edge of the frame and the other is back behind the camera. Adding a bedsheet to the foam core surface adds softness. Be sure to control the light spill with other, smaller foam cores if necessary.
I purchased a Neewer RGB Led Video Light with APP Control, 360°Full Color, 50W 660 PRO Video Lighting Kit CRI 97+ for Gaming, Streaming, Zoom,Youtube, Webex, Broadcasting, Web Conference, Photography. (2 lights, cords, diffusers, and stands):
I have purchased Neewer's light reflectors so that I can reflect the lighting already present in the library onto my main two actors. Since there is a lot of movements in the shots, some lighting set ups won't be possible or be effective. This is the best solution, as recommended by a friend I have in the audio production business attending Miami Art Institute.
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