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Using Practicals

Lighting a scene using everyday lamps realistically is a skill that earns Hollywood gaffers top dollars. Here are some tips to using practicals in your next video.

Your script calls for a scene that includes a table lamp illuminating a beautiful woman as she glances admiringly at her newly-acquired engagement ring. Sounds simple, right? Then disaster strikes. The lamp is too bright, and, when you turn down your iris to compensate for this glowing beacon, you can no longer see anything except a faint glimmer from the ring. You have just entered the exasperating world of lighting with practicals. A practical is a lighting fixture or source that you can see in the shot. The light on your subject seems to be coming from the lamp or other light fixtures that you can see. This is seldom the case. In this column, we will show you how to use practicals so that they seem natural and effective. We will show you how to create a very natural-looking scene while including the light sources that give the scene its illumination. By the end of this column, both the woman in your scene and you as the light designer will be very happy.

Practical Matters

Any time you have a working light source visible in a scene, you must consider it to be a practical. As such, you need to treat it as a primary light source in terms of where the light is coming from, but not in terms of what is actually lighting the room or your subjects. Practicals seldom actually light anything. While the lamp or window (yes, a window is a practical!) usually is much too bright for your camera, it is much too dim to actually light the scene to the level that the camera needs for a good clear image. If you want to use a practical in your scene, you must carefully control it. Once you have controlled it, you will supplement the practical with other lighting that is specifically set up to imitate the type of lighting the practical would provide.

The first step in the use of practicals is to determine which practicals you will use and the type of light they provide in a natural setting. Then you must control the practical. Finally, you must set up the lighting that will actually light the scene. Always try to make your scene look as natural as possible. If you do this carefully, the audience will be convinced that the light for the scene comes from the practical.

Controlling the Practical

There are a couple of items you should always keep in your lighting supply kit: a couple of 25-watt bulbs and a six-foot roll of black organza, a very sheer black material used to make widow's veils. These inexpensive items will enable you to control the practicals in your scene.

The 25-watt bulb will provide enough glow to make it look like the light is working, without overpowering the iris on your camera. If the lamp you are using already has a three-in-one bulb, you probably will be able to get away with using the original bulb set at its lowest wattage. Do not forget to reinstall the original bulb when you are finished with your shoot.

If you are shooting with a window in the shot, you can place the organza either on the outside of the window, if you have access to the outside, or on the inside, making sure that the material is wrinkle-free and does not blow around. Gaffer-tape the material below and above the shot lines, so that the material is very smooth. Although this will look very bad to your eye, it is practically invisible to the camera. A more expensive and truly invisible way to do this is to cover the windows with professional neutral density filters. With this plastic gel material made by Gam or Rosco, you can cover the glass in the windows, and the material is invisible to the camera. Again, it will look like the windows are an ugly gray-brown color, but the camera will see only clear glass. Be careful not to allow any bubbles behind the gel, and be sure to fasten the material to the window so that the camera cannot see the tape.