I've got a question for you.
What do you think is the most
important piece of equipment
I use to do my work?
I love good glass just
as much as the next guy,
but it isn't my lenses.
I've put a lot of time and money into
building my cinema rig,
but my red is not my most
important piece of equipment.
In all honesty, the most important thing
I use in my craft is this.
No, not my office.
This.
Well, not the mirror.
Light is the most
important part of what I do.
Painters shape paint.
Musicians shape sound.
And cinematographers,
well, they shape light.
Light is our media.
It's the foundation of
everything that we do.
It doesn't matter what lens you use
or what sensor your camera
has-- full frame, crop sensor.
Without light, you have no image.
Every step of the cinematography process
is based around light.
Before I ever press record, I'm thinking
about what sort of
lighting setup I want to achieve,
how I want the image to come across.
I have to think about
what that light will hit,
and just as
importantly, what it won't hit
to create the image I want.
That image enters the lens
and hits the camera sensor,
but doesn't just stop there.
In post, everything I do is
in an effort to shape and color
and optimize that light.
And if I do my job
correctly, when that light is
emitted from your screen
and finally meets your eyes,
it's one of the last things you notice.
For a lot of independent creators,
lighting is often one of
the most overlooked parts
of the process.
At least it was for me when I first
began my filmmaking journey.
Because let's face it,
the other components,
like your lens or your
camera, often outshine it.
No pun intended.
But if you take a look
behind the scenes of any major
production, you'll quickly realize
that lighting is the number one priority
when they begin to set
the scene and prepare
to bring their visions to life.
This is because
professional filmmakers understand
one critical truth that a lot of
hobbyists and freelancers
just simply don't.
Good lighting is invisible.
Bad lighting is impossible to miss.
Let's break this down.
Many people, when they get into
filmmaking and content
creation, can get
overwhelmed or intimidated
with the idea of using video lights.
They start out with
something like maybe a light panel
or a COB light with a big dome softbox.
The moment you try and shoot up against
bright, broad daylight
backlit windows, you'll realize there
becomes a pretty big issue.
In filmmaking, especially once you start
working with clients,
you're not always
going to be able to wait
for the perfect time with
the right ambient daylight.
You either need to work
with that existing lighting
or overpower it.
This means working with bigger
and bolder lighting equipment
for these challenging scenarios.
I want to take you guys along with me
to practice some of
these lighting setups.
I want to break down my mindset and
approach to all of it
and talk through some of
my favorite lighting tools
to utilize.
The lights we're using today are some of
the incredible lights
from Nanlite.
They sent me over their new Forza 60B
Mark II, the Forza 300B
Mark II, and the Forza 720B.
These three lights together can do a lot,
pretty much anything
you could need.
So I want to walk you guys
through a few creative lighting
setups, starting with this,
this talking head shot here
up against these windows.
The camera we're going
to be using is my Sony FX3
with the 24 to 70 2.8.
But I really want to emphasize here
that you do not need a expensive
mirrorless or cinema camera.
All of the lighting
techniques and principles
that I want to share with you guys today
will work with any camera.
OK, so right off the
bat, as you can tell,
if we expose for inside
here, myself as the subject,
we've got a lot of
overexposure happening on the windows.
What we need to do is
correctly adjust our exposure
for the light source that we can't
control within our shot.
We'll start with this circular ND filter.
Now we should be able
to adjust our exposure
to get these windows under control.
The first thing I want to
do is bring in a key light,
probably right around here,
just off the side of our shot.
For this setup, I decided to
use the Forza 300B Mark II.
And I wanted to achieve a
very soft quality of light.
Instead of using a standard dome softbox,
I ended up bouncing the
light off a 5-in-1 reflector
and diffusing it
through another large scrim.
This lighting setup
is called a book light.
And it offers an extremely soft and
naturally wrapping light.
Our goal with lighting the shot is to
essentially kind of trick
you into believing that
it's the big sliding glass
windows on the right side of
the frame that are naturally
providing the light on
myself as the subject.
I want to use one more light to really
help sell this shot.
Splotches of hard
sunlight are so naturally
occurring in the world.
And used
strategically in a setup like this
can really elevate the
quality of your shot.
I used the Forza 60B with
the spotlight attachment
to add a nice little hit
of hard light in the frame.
Spotlight attachments
are amazing for the control
that they offer.
But also, the shadow
quality and light quality
is very reminiscent of
sunlight because of how sharp
and defined the shadows will
look coming from this light.
We can even take and
use our Nanwing app here
and change the color
temperature of this light,
maybe make it a bit warmer.
Maybe that feels a
little bit more believable.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
My goal with this scene was
to create the classic wake up
first thing in the morning.
Sunlight hits your eyes.
While this setup may seem pretty simple,
it was a bit more challenging to
accomplish here because
of the way our room was set up.
This window is eastern facing.
There's some apartments kind
of directly across the way.
And so we don't really
actually get any direct sunlight
into this room.
The blinds that we have in this window
are a blackout blind.
And so I decided to grab an extra curtain
that we'd had from our old apartment,
hang that up on a C stand
to create a fake curtain.
With all the interior lights off,
we can see the shot
overall looks pretty interesting.
Definitely a certain type of vibe here.
But again, we want that
bright morning sunlight.
To do this, we're
going to use the Forza 720B
with the Fresnel and Barn doors.
The 720B has an
incredible amount of power.
And even though we're
shooting in broad daylight
with quite a bit of ambient light level,
we can easily fake sunlight.
Not to mention it's also bi-color.
So we can nicely tune
that color temperature
to get that perfect color separation
and that warm morning light.
The Fresnel attachment is great
because not only can we
better shape the beam of the light,
being able to spot or flood it
and cut the light with barn doors,
but it also increases
the output of the light
by a fairly considerable amount.
I adjusted the curtains
just a bit to allow some
of that light to come in.
And we can kind of have
a hard streak of light
kind of rake across the bed.
It's like what we'll see hit my face.
Because the walls in
our bedroom are white,
there was enough sort of
just natural fill happening
from the single light.
We have tons of areas of light and dark
throughout the frame creating really,
really nice contrast.
I love the way the hard
light hits the back wall
on the right side of the frame.
I really think it helps
to kind of draw your eye
to myself laying down in the bed
as you see me kind of reach
up and turn off my phone alarm.
My wife helps me by
playing with the curtains
and kind of wiggling them as
if wind was kind of blowing
through the window.
Typically when you come in for coverage
and you're getting these closer angles
more often than not,
you'll want to move the
light source in closer
to create a more flattering light.
But I love the way
this hard source looks,
the quality of light.
The 720B with the
Fresnel I think plays perfectly
as recreating natural sunlight here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SHOWERS SOUNDS]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I loved the idea of like a
super moody, very dark shower
scene, a close up of water
drops going down like skin
and then a steamy mirror bathroom
portrait type of thing.
I knew I wanted to do a
single overhead light source
for the shower.
But getting a softbox or
really any sort of light modifier
up above the shower over the glass,
kind of the way our
whole bathtub is set up,
tedious and difficult to say the least.
So that's where the Forza
60B and the spotlight mount
works so amazing because you can throw
super precise shapes of
light in pretty much any area
you would want.
I shined the light up into the ceiling
and realized there was
a lot of spill happening
into the ambience of the bathroom.
Again, we have white walls.
So I knew I needed to control that light
by using a tube dress of my wife's,
just dug around in the closet.
She walks in and sees me
gafftaping it up to the ceiling.
But sometimes you just
got to use what you have
and get creative.
So after using this, the black material
helps to stop the spill
of all of the extra light
throughout the bathroom and makes that
single overhead light
feel much more directional.
Exactly like what I had
in mind for this shot.
For the mirror shot,
we did the same thing.
Just used the Forza 60B and the spotlight
to put a tube shaped light right on the
corner of the mirror.
I also used this little
softbox case thing wedged
just to, again, help kind
of control some of that spill
into the bathroom to make sure we keep
good contrast levels.
Add in a little bit of
steam from this little handheld
closed steamer and turn on
the bathroom sink to full blast.
So it's just like more steam coming up.
And I think we kind of
nailed this one, to be honest.
These new version two lights
from Nanlite are incredible.
On the 300B, not only does
it have an updated design
with the ballast and the head itself,
but we also have green
and magenta shift built
into the light.
This makes it extremely
simple to color match it up
against other light sources that might
have a little bit of green
or magenta cast.
Nanlite's continued commitment and effort
to creating lighting equipment that
is accessible and fully
functional to creators
and professionals, even at the highest
level, is impressive.
And I have really, really enjoyed
working with these new lights.