Major Project - Research Into Changing the Light on a Room

For some of the scenes, I had to look into lighting a room properly because in a lot of cases we had situations in which the light kept changing naturally and others where we had no windows and had to create the light from scratch. One of the biggest issues was of course the time limit, since I didn't have hours to create the light, plus everytime we moved or the weather decided to change, this affected the shot instantly. Another issue that I found instantly was the fact that the light could be quite hard on the actors making them uncomfortable, which of course forced me to change things around or make sure that it wasn't affecting their look on camera including acting, face expressions or even getting  fatigue due to the heat.

In order to approach this properly and make the right decision, I decided to look into a couple of articles online and some videos, which talked about a lighting a room and the kind of stuff you should be looking at so you don't waste time. For me some of the most critical ones regarding changing the light of a room, were the ones in which there were no windows or the inside locations that had too many of them, not only giving too much light, but increasing the chances of natural light to change constantly. 

The first tip I got, which was useful in two type of scenes I will talk about, was the difference between a Soft Light and a Hard Light. Dramatic lighting with harsh shadows tells a far different story than flat lighting. Flat lighting takes away the drama and lets the viewer know that there are no dark secrets lurking in the shadows of someone's face.

This of course was quite important, because I wanted to use both types of lighting during the whole shoot. The soft one was going to become the most common one, since our genre is not mystery, action or big drama, but I also wanted to include some of the hard light ones across the video, in some scenes that were either dramatic or had a bit of mystery or hidden elements behind it. The first example of using the hard light was during the wedding scene, in which Dean and Ollie follow Don to a small backroom to have a chat regarding them wanting him to join the team as their coach. Originally that small room and the main room where the wedding was happening, had a very similar light, which in my opinion didn't fit, because I wanted to show that we were in different rooms and more important was giving a mood to the small room. During our test shoots this is how they looked with the standard lights

Main room 

Small room 

In order to fix this, I looked into getting rid of the lights on that small room, which of course left me with a pitch dark room since there are no windows there and the door had to remain closed. I used  a tonsil light to make this look a bit more dark but still with some light. Since the lights are yellow, of course the room was starting to get a very similar tone to the normal lightbulbs that were in that room (see image below), but at this point I decided to take on board the second tip I found which was to change the color temperature on the camera, based on the light as I wanted to give it a different look.

Incandescent bulbs are 2700K. That's warm.

Office fluorescents are around 4200K. That's a bit cooler.

Daylight is 5600K. That's cool.

Never shoot with auto white balance on your camera.

Match the color temperature of the scene you're shooting in as closely as possible.

Before Changing Camera Settings

The ideal thing was to edit the white balance from the Profile Picture setting in order to reduce the about of Kelvin to make it a bit more blue without making it look too blue. This tip helped me because it showed me how if you have a strong light and you change the color in the camera directly, you can achieve some very nice and unique tones and you probably couldn't without going through all the trouble. 

This is how the picture looked like in the end with the same light from above but a lower Kelvin in the whites:

The idea was to still keep a couple shadows on the actors and also on the room itself, to give it a bit of a drama mood to match it with the situation and what is happening on the scene.

Another scene in which I had to use a lot of these tips for changing the light on a room, was the bed scene in which Dean sleeps with 2 different girls. The problem was that I had to create a light that made it look like a bit early in the morning but that also light him up properly due to his dark color skin (I will be posting more in detail about my research on lighting a dark skin person). For this I also wanted to create a hard light in which you could see a bit of a shadow of him, to give both the scenes a mood saying "something has happened here, this guy is a legend" that way I could give it a bit of drama and establish that something was going on here. For this I used one tonsil light as well, along with a bit of natural light from the window to help me light him up a bit on his other side of the face but also the room as well. I couldn't use another tonsil because first the room was too small meaning it was going to become too bright and second I didn't want his other side of the face to be too lighted up. 

http://wistia.com/library/lighting-on-the-fly

This is how it looked like in the end for both scenes:

Lighting is not simple but at the same time it is not realistic. None of the light you see on camera is actually real compare to what you see with your eyes and I found this fact that actually helped a lot to understand how to light properly and actually focus on how the scene looks like rather on making it look really realistic 

"Video lighting isn't realistic. The lighting we're used to seeing in films and network video isn't usually true to life. In fact, it's often very unnatural. In most cases, it's an improvement on reality for the benefit of the camera. Where does the light come from in the night scenes? "Realistic" would be to shoot in darkness, but you might as well leave the lens cap on. How about those network interviews? In many cases, "realistic" would be to shoot using ugly overhead fluorescent lighting-just like in your classroom. A video professional would never shoot under those conditions. Instead, they use flattering, portrait-like soft light for the subject with a nice little accent in the background. When you see an expert interviewed in his office on network TV, that's not how the office is normally lit."

http://www.techlearning.com/news/0002/light-right--a-crash-course-in-lighting-video/55734