From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography

Where should you place lights?

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography

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Where should you place lights?

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- Perhaps the single most common question that new DP's have is: "Where should I put the lights?" The placement of the lights really determines if the image looks like a professional did it or an amateur did it. If you've ever seen a really talented DP at work, they make it look so easy. Well, in this chapter we're going to demystify this process a little bit. We'll look at the difference it makes when light hits a subject from all different directions and the way that that might impact your storytelling. In this particular tutorial, we'll look at lighting a subject from different sides as well as my own personal preference for lighting people. While we were shooting Bitsy here, we had Elijah just walk around her with the key light so we can see it fall on her face from different sides. Lighting from behind the subject seems to create a great sense of mystery. But lighting directly from the back creates even more mystery as we kind of just get this halo here. As we light the face directly from the side, we get a little more light, but we also draw a dramatic line down the center of the face as half of the face is entirely in shadow. This is usually a very intense and serious look. As we bring the light around towards the front of the face, we have a very common lighting angle. When you light the face from this angle, the nose creates a shadow on the cheek that creates like an inverted triangle under the eye. This is usually a pretty flattering angle for most faces. This lighting angle is actually seen in a lot of paintings by the old renaissance masters, particularly in the portraits by Rembrandt. You can see that little tell-tale triangle here in A Polish Nobleman. Or here in Lucretia or here in his self-portraits, like this one from 1660. Lighting the subject directly from the front usually isn't my favorite. When I say front, I mean from the direction of the camera. This angle tends to flood the face with light eliminating any shadows and that diminishes all the interesting components of the face-- it makes it feel flat. It really doesn't look cinematic to me. The shot we looked at earlier from The Talented Mr. Ripley that had the sourcey light also had light coming from the front. As we'll look at later in this course, this is what made a lot of the shots of our counsel scene and the sick scene as well, feel kind of flat and boring. However, if from the front you angle the light up a little bit like we see here on Bitsy, it looks more like a spotlight. Now this is a stylized look for sure as it makes the subject feel like they're kind of on a stage, but I kind of like this look for fashion photography. I just haven't found an opportunity to use this yet for a film. We'll talk more in the next tutorial about lighting from above in the implications of that. So we've seen the light from the front, the back, and the sides. For me personally after shooting so much material for The Assurance, I discovered that I really love lighting from behind the subject. I find it infinitely more interesting visually. It illuminates the contours and shapes of the faces in such an interesting and elegant way and it tends to be more flattering. It also seems to kind of tell a story, that they're revealing themselves to the side facing away from us and leaving us on the audience side in the dark. I wonder if on some level it makes us curious to know the subject more because it creates a visual metaphor of someone who is not disclosing all themselves to us. A lot of our case studies that we'll look at later in this training series have the subject lit from behind. Remember though, as with all art this is subjective. You might find that you have a preference for lighting from a certain angle over another or you might find that you like different angles in different situations. The key is to know what you're doing. Next let's explore lighting from above the subject.

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