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Lighting Lighting Film Noir Style

In the 1940s and 50s, a film style called film noir filled the silver screens in America. Movies such as The Maltese Falcon and Touch of Evil portrayed the dark side of American life, full of urban crime and vice. Film noir had a distinct style, with shadow-filled low-key lighting. Night ruled in film noir, the shadow more important than the light.

In this column, we will take a look at the basics of good film noir lighting and prepare you for a great shoot in the dark November night.

To be able to light in the film noir style, you need to remember three things about lighting.

First of all, to get a good crisp shadow, you need a small intense light. This is called hard light. You can create hard light with a small, very intense lighting fixture. The sun is the best example of a hard light. Step out on any sunny day, and you will see the crisp shadows created by this very intense but small light source. Reflector spots, Fresnels, theatrical lekos and ellipsoidals make great hard lights. A bare bulb in a socket is also a hard light, but usually it does not provide enough light to give you the effect you need to create film noir-style scenes.

The second thing you need to remember about lighting is the difference between high- and low-key lighting. Remember, it has nothing to do with the key light in your lighting setup. Low- or high-key lighting is actually a result of the intensity of your fill light. If you have a lot of fill light, you have created high-key lighting, where the key and fill are almost equal in brightness. However, if you have very little or no fill light, then you have created low-key lighting.

The final thing you need to remember about lighting is that you need to use more light to get solid crisp blacks and stark whites. Just because it seems that a bare bulb in the ceiling is lighting a scene doesn't mean it is. A lot of new videographers are so enamored of their camera's low-light capability that they think they can get away with natural light or lighting a scene with everyday light bulbs. This is a long way from reality. If you shoot with natural light or the bulb in your living room lamp, you will end up with a picture that is full of dull grays and gray whites. You need to add light to the scene to increase the contrast between the dark and light areas. You want your blacks and shadows to be crisp black. You want your whites to be white. To get this, you need a very good low-key lighting setup. You can still make it look like a single bulb is lighting the scene, but the single bulb will be a 1K Fresnel or reflector spot mounted near the ceiling with its light beam very tightly fo…