How to prevent indoor lighting problems and utilize various specialty lighting setups for your videos.
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Since we’ve already taken a look at some of the more professional lighting techniques, this time around, we’re gonna look at some of the solutions to those issues when utilizing those basic foundations to create professional looking video.
First up, we’re gonna be taking a look at what you could do when shooting with a window and how it creates a backlight and we can use that to our advantage. Then, we’re gonna be taking a look at some of the more specialized lighting techniques, such as time lapse and silhouette lighting.
So, let’s talk about indoor lighting. If you guys can see Julie behind me, you can see that she’s in front of a very big window and she’s very backlit. It looks like a silhouette. This is an example where we don’t wanna silhouette. We want to be able to see her face and we want to be able to light her up. The problem is in such a small room with such a big window, we can’t necessarily do that unless we take a look at some simple solutions, which is what we’re gonna do in step number one.
Now, all of you have seen one of these pieces of happiness right there. This generally blocks the sunlight in your car and goes right under the windshield. You can also use aluminum foil wrapped around cardboard, anything that reflects light. This is gonna work in place of our reflectors since maybe we’re beginners and we can’t afford one yet, maybe we can’t find one, we don’t know where the store is. Whatever the reason, you can always use one of these. And if you notice here, what I’m gonna do is just simply turn it towards Julie, catch the sun from behind her, and it’s gonna work almost as a fill light or a key light and it’s gonna brighten up her face.
Now, in case we actually have the light set up, which, in our situation, we do, you can always just walk over here and go to step number two of this solution and bring the light closer to Julie. Look at her face now. It’s all lit up. That backlight is actually working for us, almost as if we have a three point lighting scenario.
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Now, remember not to sell yourself short. If you have household lamps, all you have to do is move them closer. Sure, they’re not as powerful as these professional lights we’re using, but it can still be done inside your house, your office, wherever you are where you have a big window and you wanna shoot video.
Now, that we’ve figured out the solution and we know the rules when it comes to backlighting, let’s take a look at how we could actually create backlighting and use it to our advantage to conceal somebody’s identity. As you can see, we’re working indoors inside of a studio. We have a professional lighting set up. What we’re gonna do now is eliminate all of our overhead lights and also eliminate everything in front of Julie, which will then create more of a big window lighting situation like we had earlier. Now, we can control just exactly how much light hits her and how much light is gonna cover her face.
We’re gonna start that process by step number one, which is gonna be to kill each and every one of our lights that are in front of her.
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Once we’ve killed all the overhead lights, every light around her, and created a very dark studio, when we turn on the backlight, you can see that with it raised about three feet above her head and about six feet behind her, it makes her look very menacing. It conceals her identity. Now, if Julie wanted to talk about the evil things she has done, nobody would know who she is.
Now, that we can see how to utilize this silhouette effect to our advantage, as well as how to clean up the mistakes of when it happens when we don’t want it to, it’s time to move on to step number three, which is gonna be some more specialty lighting techniques that we can use to create an even more menacing Julie.
We’re gonna be using a low Rifa soft box light and take off the cover to give us a little bit more of a harsher, direct light. For you guys at home, if you don’t have this type of lighting set up, you can just use a simple flashlight and aim it directly under the chin of the subject you want to look more menacing. Three feet under her chin, we’re gonna turn it on. It’s gonna blind her, but the use of the backlight that we have in place as well is gonna add a little bit more light that’s gonna cover just her head area and, basically, get her eyes and the top of her mouth. The reason for this is so that we can create or recreate a very scary campfire tale.
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Now, that Julie’s looking very menacing, it’s time to set up our backlight, which is gonna cascade even more light down to bring out her eyes a little bit.
Now, once again, you don’t need a professional lighting set up for this effect. Look at Julie here. She has a flashlight and it’s working just fine. Make a menacing face Julie.
Grrrr.
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That’s scary. Let’s take a look at our next step.
The last thing we’re gonna look at in terms of specialty lighting is going to be time lapse video and how we do this effect is with one simple light and some simple props and we’re gonna make the shadows, control them to go the way we want. By doing this in a very slow manner, it’s gonna give us the impression that a lot of time has passed while we’ve been looking at the same objects.
What we’re gonna do first is eliminate all the light we have in the studio right now that’s creating a very dark environment. The second thing we’re gonna do is move our background closer so that we can’t see somebody actually walking behind the table. And the last thing we’re gonna do, of course, is actually the motion with the light, which will create our effect.
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Lighting adds an element of professionalism to each and every one of your videos and, hopefully, these specialized tricks will help you take it to even a higher notch next time you go out and try to create some video.
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