- What's going on guys?
Today we're going be talking about lighting
and how to do epic...
Oh man.
(laughs)
I thought you were supposed to be
good at lighting.
Let's give a warm round of applause to
Eric Fickenwirth.
(clapping)
He is a professional pilates instructor.
- No.
I'm a gaffer, also known as the
Chief Lighting Technician.
Gaffer, it's a funny nickname.
Because if you look it up, it might say
grumpy old man.
- Eric likes to do, like these crazy setups
with 20 lights.
Why don't you just turn on the light switch?
Why you got to make it so complicated?
I think the dog just farted.
- I mean we could turn the light switch.
You want to see what that looks like?
- Yeah let's do that.
I think lighting is overrated.
You don't need all this crap.
Yeah sure, it's a little bit dark
but that's what the ISO button is for, dude,
you just crank that up.
You're job is basically useless.
- If you try to make things look more cinematic
or you're trying to get a particular look,
that maybe clients or other people will like
without having to think about liking it
They'll just look at it and go,
"Oh that looks great."
They don't have to think about why they like it.
That's my job.
- Okay. Well I'm about to throw up looking at this frame
so let's turn those lights back on.
Today we're going to take a step back and just see
what we can just achieve with just one light source.
And we're going to go with the Aputure 120D.
- (Eric) This particular fixture is LED.
We're choosing to use LED, it's a newer technology
it's much more common.
It's really interesting to see this transition
we're going through nowadays where
LEDs are dominating most of the package.
- What's the most common LED light you see on like
big productions, like the ones you work on?
- Skypanel S60-C is the most common fixture.
(Music)
- But in this video, we're going to dial everything back.
Now the reason why we're going with the Aputure 120D
it's a very clean light, right out of the box,
it looks very natural, especially when you consider
the price point, it's very powerful.
It's pretty modular as well so you can run it off
a household socket in a house
but you can also run it off V mount batteries.
You can switch out the head with the reflector,
you can also throw on a fresnel,
you can also throw on a dome light
and that's what we're using right now.
And if you have just one, you can do a whole lot with it.
And also we're going to be using one of these discs.
(Grunts)
- (Potato Jet) These you can find on amazon for
like 20 bucks.
When you're getting started, you definitely
need one of these.
You got a gold reflector, a white bounce,
it's basically a cover that you can invert
so you have a black side or a negative fill
and also a silver side and also a little floppy frame
with diffusion.
So we're going to take you through 10 lighting setups
that you can achieve with just a few pieces of lighting gear
and here we go.
(soft music)
- (Eric) So the first setup we're doing is
we're just going to show what a fresnel lens can do.
Unmodify on someone's face.
- (Eric) Harsh lighting.
By adding shadows, you're adding shape.
You're modeling.
Essentially adding depth.
- (Potato Jet) There's Eric and there's the light
right at about two o'clock slightly above eye level.
With the lights coming in slightly from above,
it tends to look a little bit more natural because
the sun always comes in from above.
You can also make mini-modifications to this setup.
I'm going to take this reflector and just
bounce around a little bit.
See what we can get.
Let's move on to lighting setup number two
which is probably the most common.
- We're going to switch this fresnel attachment
out for softbox.
We're going to introduce our lighting technique
called the Rembrandt.
So this just pops right off.
Here's our softbox.
When you're doing this, don't rush because
that's when gear can get damaged and
when you're working so closely with other people,
they can feel if you're stressed.
If you're working with someone for 12-14 hours
the last thing you want is to be around
a stressed person all the time.
And here we go, we're going to strike it on.
Boom. There we go.
- We have the lighting fixture set up in the same spot
but with a softbox on so the lighting is much softer now.
Now we're going to go for the Rembrandt effect
which is going to be a little bit more dramatic
so I'm just going to take this and slide this over
even just moving the light like a foot or so
it can make a pretty big difference on how
much shadow it casts on his face.
This is pretty frontal here but as I slide it back
you just start seeing more of the shadows and depth
being created.
You can always slide it back and forth
and find your sweet spot.
- If you notice on the opposite side of my face
there's kind of a little triangle underneath the eye
on this upper part of the cheek.
- (Eric) Now that's called a Rembrandt because
in his paintings, that what he wound do.
He would paint it so that there was a little triangle
of light on the opposite side of wherever
the main light source was coming from.
- (Potato Jet) So we've got a camera and right above
the camera is that light.
Look I lost some weight!
I didn't actually lose weight in the last few minutes
but it definitely looks like I lost some weight
because it kind of cleans all this up,
it takes all this and shaves it down
with the sculpting of the light.
- Yeah so essentially what we're trying to do
is to create this beauty lighting effect
with the slight centered, frontal, up high.
So where you really see the difference is in the face.
If you look at where the shadow is falling.
- (Eric) If you look at his neck right now,
there's this really pleasing shadow.
- Hide that double chin! Heck yeah.
And all this chunk right here?
All this chunk? Hidden with shadows.
I love it.
- So it's very flattering with this softbox.
Everything is smooth, you get a shine in both eyes
so you can see the color of my eyes.
- So we've got that beauty light from above
and if it's too contrasty, you're getting too many shadows
and it's little bit too much,
another common technique is to put a
bounce card underneath so
- (Potato Jet) first you're getting most light
coming from above
coming straight down to Eric's face.
And then you have an additional throw
that's going to add a little bit of fill
because this light is going to bounce off this paper
and kind of just fill in a little bit of that underside
if it is too contrasty.
- Alright so we're going to switch over to our
next lighting setup
where we're going to do an overhead lighting setup.
This is a C-stand. 40-inch arm.
If you're going to do this, just be careful.
One, major rule of using a c-stand,
big leg with the bag on it and the arm are
in the same direction.
If I twist it, right,
say you have a light on here
and the stand is not falling over.
But as soon as you pull this back
this thing's going to fall.
Then you're talking about hurting the equipment,
hurting yourself and we don't want that.
Another thing is if you look at the script head,
you want the weight to be falling in the same direction
as the griphead tightens.
The reason being is the more that it pulls down,
ideally it tightens at the head.
- Oh man, I actually really like this one here.
- (Eric) The most iconic film I can think of that
utilizes this lighting a lot was Godfather.
- (Eric) In fact, there's a story that talks about
when Marlon Brando was on the set of Godfather,
executives were like, "Why can't we see their eyeball?"
It's just dark circles around their eyes. Why?
The DP's response was, "Well, that's their character.
It's this dark, sinister character."
So that's what we're trying to do.
- One of the trickier setups to get into
but definitely looks really cool
and it's still the softbox coming straight down on him
You definitely have to be cautious of
how the shadows are hitting this subject's face
when you use a setup like this.
Very, very slight movements will make
big differences on how shadows hit his face.
Something as simple as a hat can cover just his eyes
or his whole face just by a slight angle.
Just like other setups, if it becomes a little bit
too contrasty, you can balance it out
by either using a bounce card or
a silver reflecty.
A silver reflecty. That's a technical term guys.
- (Potato Jet) Depending on how moody you want it to be
you can control a lot of that.
Just with simple modifiers and reflectors and
bounce cards.
- So what we're going to do is
we're going to swap the softbox out with the fresnel.
To get a spotted beam, we're going to fog it up.
So you guys can see what that looks like.
- I don't know the specifics of a fog machine
and a hazer but a hazer typically comes out
softer and less like a cloud
so it's more of like a atmospheric thing.
And this is a hazer I got.
I think it was around 300 bucks or something like that.
But industry standards is a DF-50.
I heard the difference between this and
the professional DF-50 which I think is a
couple thousand dollars
is that the DF-50 can break apart all the little particles
so you don't really see particles floating around
on camera. All you do see is like an atmosphere.
So if there's lights coming through
you see beam of it as opposed to cheaper hazers
like this one where you might see some particles
floating around because the particle size
of the haze is much thinner and smaller
on a professional grade hazer.
But I don't have one of those
so we'll plug this in for now.
(Rock music)
- After it spits it out,
it might now always be broken up.
Sometimes you have to waft it.
- You don't want it to be too clumpy
so you want to break it up by karate chopping
- (Eric) Kill those house lights,
we're going to go dark.
And here we go.
Whoohoo!
You look like you're about to be abducted.
Basically same setup as before
but just switched out with a fresnel head
and we got this hazer on.
- It might look like a little Bohemian Rhapsody.
So nice thing about haze is you can create these
beams of light.
- Whoa. That's weird.
When you're in this light, you can't see anything.
The light on a fresnel directly behind
the toweling with a touch of haze.
This should look pretty awesome.
- (Potato Jet) What are you doing with my rug?
- I'm wafting.
- (Potato Jet) Eric is going to do his
rise from the dead scene.
Here we go.
(Music)
- I'm totally editing this into a music video.
With music this is not going to seem so awkward.
(Music)
- So next we're going to utilize a technique
called Skip Bounce.
We've got our fresnel attachment on our Aputure 120D.
Now we're going to white bounce.
- (Potato Jet) We're now starting to get into some
niche lighting where you're not going to
want to use this lighting all the time.
Since the lighting is going to be coming from below
it's going to be very moody and almost like this
flashlight look from below but
this is a little bit too much and crazy.
- (Potato Jet) So it's kind of a mellow version of that.
But generally the same characteristics and feel
you get from that kind of spooky, unnatural look.
But I have used this kind of lighting before
in a techy space.
We did a shoot for bowling once and
we had a bunch of panels.
That was supposed to be like graphic displays.
So it can be used in a horror look but it can
also be used in like a techy environment.
Where screens are naturally glowing up
at you from below.
Now another thing that you can experiment
with to get a little bit creative is
actually moving the light.
- (Potato Jet) A little bit difficult to incorporate
into narrative but sometimes for music videos
it just looks a little bit more dynamic
without moving the camera.
But I've also used it for product shots
where if you just slightly move the lighting around
it kind of creates this interesting feel.
- So what we're going now is
we're going to try a silhouette.
- Key of this setup is to make sure
that all the light goes on to the background.
You try to isolate yourself from that light.
So you're in the dark pocket
and all the light is directed towards the background.
Try to limit as much of the bounce
as possible on yourself.
- (Eric) Ultimately we want this crisp
clean figure in our frame.
That's how you really get a true silhouette.
- Alright so here's a pretty dramatic one.
This one's lighting effect comes in straight
from the side and we have our five in one
reflector set to the black side
which is going to catch all the light
and basically reduce any reflection that was
going to come in from the side.
So when we use the bounce side of this
it becomes a filler light
but when we use the black side
it's a negative fill.
Just absorbs all that light
making this angle very dramatic.
- Any sort of black absorbing material will work.
Your five in one reflector will work.
There's a typical type of fabric we use called Duvetyne
or commando cloth.
And the reason you do this is so you can see
some of the face but you don't see all the face
- (Eric) and doing so you create a little bit of mystery.
So adds a little bit of drama.
So if you compare this to say,
you know a beauty light.
You feel something different.
- So that's what it does with the negative fill.
But we can also take that shiny board
block it back a little bit behind the subject
and we would walk it out a little bit further
but the space is just a little bit too small to do that.
That's why you can see the reflector
but generally you want that shiny reflector
to be behind the subject
kind of coming in at an angle.
- (Eric) What you're doing is you're creating
layers on the face.
We have our side light, then we have some shadow
then we have kind of an edge.
- (Potato Jet) Whenever you're working with
an intense back light, you sometimes get
this issue with glowing ear.
You basically need a tape cutting expert
to perfectly cut out a shape of your ear.
- (Eric) What we're using here is a 2 inch
photoblacked tape.
- No glowy ear! How perfect!
Especially if you have big dumbo sized ears
like me very useful.
Hollywood's secrets revealed.
- So what we're setting up now is
typically referred to as a three-quarter
backlight setup.
This is pushing to give me this crisp edge
along my body here.
- (Eric) We're going to set up a bounce on this side
to return some of that light.
The first time I heard about this was from a
photographer who utilized this kind of lighting
setup outside where instead of an Aputure 120D,
he was using the sun.
Maybe you're on golden hour and sort of thing
you see this white crisp edge you see on me now
it was a nice golden yellow.
- Now we're blasting Eric's face with really harsh light
Now he is blind.
HE is no longer able to work as a gaffer.
- (Potato Jet) One of the benefits of a really
harsh light is that you can shape it
and sculpt it into a shape or
let's say you're going for an artistic look
where you've just cut or slashed part of the light
it's very easy to do when you have a fresnel
as opposed to a soft light.
Or we can just take a harsh light and
you know that middle piece in our five in one floppy?
- It's not a floppy.
- It should be called a floppy.
Look how floppy it is.
This is way floppier than actually actual floppy.
This should be called a floppy.
- For those of you who don't know what a floppy is
you can go look it up and you can see why
I'm always laughing throughout this video
at how he refers to it as a floppy.
- But the middle piece in our five in one reflector
you just throw that in front of the talent
and all of a sudden our harsh light is
nice and soft.
Look how beautiful you look.
Oh my god. We look gorgeous.
We're hot as (bleep).
We should go to the club tonight.
On the contrary, if you have a light
that's already soft out of the box,
then it's pretty tricky to get that into
a nice harsh sharp light shaping it
and all that.
I think that's pretty much a wrap.
Thanks to Eric for coming out.
We've worked on a bunch of project here
in LA together.
We go pretty way back.
If you want to hit up Eric for anything
have any questions
shoot him a DM on instagram.
- I had a great time.
I hope you learned a lot and you know
I love to talk lighting and lighting techniques.
I look forward to collaborating and
communicating with you guys.
- Anyway, thank you guys for watching
all the way to the end.
I know lighting is not like the most popular
topic on Youtube.
Even though it should be.
It's one of the most important parts of
making an image look cinematic.
And even if you don't set up lights
the fundamentals are still the same.
When you go out and look at a naturally lit
environment like this,
you look around and say okay,
that's where the sources of lights are.
Think of the sun as a super harsh light
like a fresnel.
This white wall somewhere, if the sun's bashing it
think of that as a big soft source.
Also I got to apologize.
A lot of that sound was kind of messed up.
I don't know if you guys heard it.
I got this microphone and I put it up with the camera
and I didn't realize I didn't heighten it down
on the hot shoot enough.
So if it's kind of loose on the camera
and I move around the camera you hear
(rattling noise)
that super annoying?
So after recorded all that I was like
crap I've got to tighten it down.
Anyways let's read some top comments from the last video.
Top comment was from...
Well thank you.
I am actually starting a second channel
all dedicated to toilet paper but
first video is going to be reviewing the
Charmin ultra soft.
I highly recommend the jumbo rolls.
Those rolls last you so much longer and
you don't have to switch it out all the time.
You don't have to deal with looking at that
empty just like brown roll thing on the inside
just with barely any tissue on it.
No you put on a jumbo roll it will last you
a pretty long time.
The Charmin is the brand I like to go with
and Charmin if you want to sponsor me
with unlimited toilet paper for life
that'd be fantastic.
I just lost some light.
That is the downside of natural lighting.
It's always changing if it's a cloudy day.
How long is this up thing going to last?
Lefty up here. Come on.
Who's a good doggy? Who is a good doggy?
Funny you mention that.
I've been filming that video for the last couple days
and I think I'm just about done.
I just have to edit it now.
So come in later this week so
make sure you're subscribed for that.
(Music)