so you're wanting to create a dark short film not necessarily in terms of the
story that you tell but more the cinematography it's literally a
dark image that you're wanting to create but the problem is every time you take
the lights out of the scene and hit record you end up with an image that is
mostly black but also incredibly noisy how do you solve these problems without
flooding the scene with light and completely ruining the atmosphere or
moon you're trying to create let's take a look at a few tips
too bright movies and tv shows have been getting a lot darker over the last
couple of years and this is caused by several things
including the lighting on set the set decoration in costumes
and the color grading and post-production they go through after
everything has been shot so how do you match this look at home
the first thing is to use soft lighting there are a couple different ways to get
soft lighting the first is to use a softbox which is the kind of light that
we have here it comes with a diffuser built in to
spread the lighting and make it less harsh
you can also bounce the light so if you don't have a diffuser you can point the
light away from your actors and bounce it using either a white wall
or a reflector or basically anything white
that's how the light is reflected moving the light farther away from your actor
also diffuses it oh my god it's kind of a given that you
should avoid overexposing any part of your shot
but it's also important when you're lighting for darkness that you don't
have any areas which are much brighter than the rest of your footage
even if they're not technically overexposed these areas are going to be
harder to bring down to match everything else when you're actually color grading
the shot what you're trying to avoid is the harsh
shadows on your actor's face or the set that you're shooting
this is because even if you color grade the shot later your eye will be able to
tell that there are light and dark areas because of those harsh lines speaking of
the set it is important that your art direction
helps the idea that your footage is going to end up dark you can't really
have your actors wearing neon and bright colors and then expect the footage to
look good when you turn down all the colors and
brightness be careful though that doesn't mean you should put all of your
actors in black clothing because the details will quickly be lost
an example of this is severus snape from the harry potter films even though his
costume appears black in the final shots you can see from behind the scenes
photos and videos that it's actually a mix of dark blues
and dark greens this is because the color grade plays a
huge part in the final look of your film what is
the price for your blind eye the color grade is what happens
after you've shot your footage and are now bringing it into your editor of
choice of course we're going to go with HitFilm
so these tips will cater to that software when it comes to the color
grade it's not as simple as just turning the exposure down all the way
an important thing you have to do is respect the highlights and the bright
areas of your footage if you're using HitFilm Pro i would
highly recommend learning how to use the scopes panel if you don't know already
if you're in express and want scopes take a look at the color scopes pack
you can start by lowering the exposure but then tweak the other values like the
shadows or the black areas so that you don't lose detail when
everything goes down it can be useful to use the color balance effect which
affects the shadows mid-tones and highlights separately if
you need to adjust specific areas of your footage
also remember that when things get dark they tend to lose color so be sure to
bring that saturation down the darker you go i don't think tom has
fully recovered from the shoot earlier today i'm a bit worried about him
tom
remember that if you put your effects on grade layers you can mask them out so
that they only affect specific areas of your footage
so if you lowered the brightness of the entire shot and are liking the way it
looks but you want your actor's face to be
just a bit brighter you can do that with a mask
check out the bleach bypass effect as well this is great for adding a sort of
silvery look to your footage be careful though because it does crush
the shadows quite a bit if you're in express you can achieve this with a hue
saturation and lightness effect on a grade layer
remove all of the saturation and then set the blend of the grade to either
soft light or overlay vignettes are also a good way to darken
the edges of your footage and draw focus to an area that you want
but they can be used incorrectly because what they're doing is just overlaying
black onto your footage if you have a highlight in your footage
like a window or a lamp and you add a vignette on top of that
it's going to dull the footage down to a dark grey which isn't very appealing
so to get around that what we're going to do is first create a white plane
add the vignette effect invert it with the effect of the same name
add a demult effect which will remove all of the black
invert it again and then set the blend of the layer to soft light or overlay
you can see that it's respecting and leaving those highlights in the shot
but darkening the mid-tones and shadows like a vignette should another way to do
this is to just mask out a black plane invert the mask and feather but you
won't have any of the controls that the vignette effect offers
hopefully you guys found these tips useful feel free to leave any questions
you have or tips of your own down in the comments below
thanks for watching and we'll see you all in the next video