Finding Light for Video

So what do you do if your lights get held up at the airport or if you don't have any lights? One thing that nearly every videographer hears is that their videos would be so much better if only they had one more piece of equipment, and so my closet has filled with tripod heads, softboxes, light stands, beauty dishes, bags bags bags bags, grids, snoots, and all sorts of things. And, you know what? The right equipment very often can save a situation but not as much as clever thinking. The challenge of not having the perfect piece of equipment can very often be the creative push that you need to do something special and out of the ordinary.

Light can either be natural or man-made. Today's video cameras are so sensitive to light that videographers can shoot in light that would have made the great directors of yesteryear weep, moonlight or candlelight are both viable options. Look at every object that produces light as a potential source for your video. Car headlights - Ridley Scott lit a climactic scene in his 1978 film Alien with a rotating police light, the flashing added to the tension as the set was first lit and then sent into darkness. Jonathan Demme chose equally unexpected but dramatic lighting in the final moments of his 1991 film Silence of the Lambs where Jodie Foster is chased through a completely unlit basement by a villain wearing night vision goggles.

All light is an imitation of the sun. The reason that Hollywood doesn't always like to use the sun is that it's not completely reliable. It moves, or rather the earth moves around it, so even 10 minutes into a shoot you can see changes on the shadows of your subjects unless you have them constantly moving in conjunction with the sun... not a viable option. Then there's cloud cover to consider, a completely overcast day is a dream to filmmakers, but doesn't happen too often.

With artificial lighting you can achieve the same, constant, unchanging light regardless of the time of day or how overcast it might be. With artificial lighting you can make a scene brighter or dimmer by adding or subtracting lights or changing their position. But it wasn't always like this - Thomas Edison, who invented "moving pictures" as we know them built the first motion picture studio, The Black Maria which involved not only a roof that opened up to let the sun in, but the entire building was built on casters so that it could be rotated as the sun moved across the sky.