Lighting night interiors
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- čas přidán 16. 08. 2023
- a couple different techniques and approaches to lighting night interiors for film. getting the cinematic look, and cinematic lighting are very subjective and tricky tasks. this video touches on a few techniques and practices that I have developed and learned over the years. as always, there are no right answers and this is a look at a few ways to approach the look we see in movies and films. there are more ways to do it, and even this is not a fully finished look. testing like this can allow you to better communicate to your gaffer what you are looking for, it can even reveal little tricks, just like the iPhone flashlight revealed to me in this video, and it can make you a better image maker overall.
All footage had the same look (a look that I built over the years) applied in davinci resolve. Shots were not individually altered, same exact grade on every clip.
equipment used:
Arri Alexa mini LF
Great Joy Blazar 50mm 1.8x anamorphic T2.9 lens
2 forza 500 daylight LED lights
aputure light dome II with diffusion and grid
2 aputure B7 bulbs
1 aputure MC LED light
unknown light that I will post the name of when it is in front of me next.
Hit me up with any questions and join my discord: / discord - Krátké a kreslené filmy
![How to Light a Night Scene with Shane Hurlbut ASC [Part 1: Setting Up Your Key Light]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wDHoqne58AA/mqdefault.jpg)
![How to Light a Night Scene with Shane Hurlbut ASC [Part 1: Setting Up Your Key Light]](/img/tr.png)
00:00 - Intro
00:34 - Initial lighting setup, facing challenges with dark areas and shadows.
01:44 - Experimenting with practical lights and their impact on the scene.
03:09 - Using practical lights creatively, considering small practical sources for lighting.
04:33 - Adjusting lights for better exposure and realism, adding potential backlighting.
06:10 - Enhancements made for the scene, including exterior lighting and key light diffusion.
07:44 - Fine-tuning practical lights' impact, managing reflections, and overall scene balance.
09:33 - Achieving a more complete and satisfactory lighting setup, further improvements discussed.
Thanks for this, I meant to add to the description.
The fact he did this for you shows the love. 🤙
I owe a favor!
I love these videos because this is EXACTLY how I taught myself lighting when I was in my teens and early 20s. I used to stay up at night for HOURS just tweaking lighting for product shots and portrait setups using random stuff in my house and myself as a model. To this day 15 years later I still flash back to those setups whenever I'm trying to think through a complex shot. Thank you so much for covering your late night experiments like this. It's 100% my vibe.
I love that you know the late night testing game. Such valuable insights to find. I also find that I push myself a little harder knowing I’m posting these tests to CZcams. It’s kind of the whole reason I started posting. Something to push me to run more tests. Last night for example I would not have put the light outside if it was just me testing for the vault.
@@BlaineWestropp1 finding something that motivates you to go the extra mile is what gives you the edge over everyone else. Really glad you’re bringing us along for your ride
@@TechnicalGamingChannel thanks again, this is already a fun ride, and I plan to do some really cool stuff here!
I know little to nothing about cinematography.
The biggest thing that I see that allows this night scene to happen is the walls aren’t white. In fact there is little white (other than the window pains) in the scene which helps soak up anything from bouncing around and creating more spill.
Fantastic set up with no crew. Good shit
thank you! no white walls helps. when you have white walls you really need to block them out! (sometimes).
Comment if you’re in the 360p club
i need to wait for 720p at least :(
lmao wassup
144p 😂
Dang, only 720p 😢
Nah 144p
I love hearing you work through your process!!
Oh hi eposvox! Thank you!
love that these are presented without a traditional educational/informational structure. your loose, unpredictable presentation provides a fun, insightful, different way in understanding your highly technical, yet artistic methodology. i'm new to your channel and have already watched 4-5 of your videos back to back. i'm a VFX artist in NYC looking to learn more about how the footage i work on day-to-day is made, and you've been an incredible source thus far. thank you for your posts!
Thank you so much. That means a lot. I like the format and have more on the way!
one of the best channels on yt for anything cinematography related tbh.
Thank you 😊
I absolutely love these breakdowns. They are SO helpful and inspirational. I get a lot of ideas for lighting from them. Thank you!
thank you, more on the way!
These are great. I like this format.
Thank you Robert!
best content on youtube for young cinematographers
Thank you! Trying to share some stuff that took me a long time to understand.
Very cool. Now let’s see Paul Allen’s night interior setup
Let me see what I can do
Keep it up dude. I’ve watched your videos a dozen+ times. Learned I need to get more lighting!
Thank you! More on the way!
Love hearing all of this thought process Blaine. All of this is literal gold!
thanks so much Jordan! more to come.
@@BlaineWestropp1 can't wait man!
Me too. Love posting this stuff.
These videos are so helpful. Appreciate your uploads!!
thanks so much Mig 🙂 more to come
0:48 him: Did i tell you , you could turn that monitor off??
her: gone
😂😂 gone!
Love these dude
thank you! more on the way 😇
Absolute gold. Great video and great breakdown of your thought process
Thank you :)
It’s actually healthy to have a conversation with yourself.
Noice video Blaine, like always.
Hahah thank you :)
This video was so informational but so calming to sit and watch at the same time
thank you 🙂 more to come.
This is so simple, yet it looks SO GREAT! Thanks for this video man!
hey thanks Roberto, more to come!
Favorite CZcamsr
❤️❤️
Very nice. I would love someone, a person like yourself perhaps to address the elephant in the room about lighting with practicals which is the often ridiculous use of practicals placed in scenes with the expectation that the audience is supposed to read the scene as normal yet the sheer number of them in a frame makes it look wholly unnatural. An even more absurd example of lighting gone mad is demonstrated so brilliantly in one film shot by the great roger deakins. In two scenes both in bright daylight the solutions are so poles apart as to make the concept of creating believable lighting to a rational leave the building entirely. The film is no country for old men. Scene one deputy about to be strangled by AC. Deakins solution is to shine a fresnel into the top left of the frame at the ceiling wall join to bounce light back into the room without placing a fixture visibly in frame. Beautiful. Love that. Simple. Solves a problem and works. Scene two CW carson wells visits boss headquarters and boss is sitting behind a desk back to a huge window that covers most of the background. Cw is front lit of course by all the natural light. He is facing the window and the boss sitting at his desk. (Btw it is a super bright day) YET the room is absolutely covered in practicals all on in broad daylight. ???? There must be about 8 lights on in the scene. The rest of the film seems to approach the issue of upstage daylight by using simple bounce maybe and all looks very natural but this one scene just makes me wonder, what were they thinking. It looks immediately ridiculous to me. The whole film is shot in a kind of bright arizona or texas sunlight so maybe this is what people actually do out there but i just cannot explain how on the day someone doesn’t say. Hey i love the look but I’m not sure this eeally rings true to life. It seems a contrivance to always have a practical somewhere in shot in the background but so many cinematographers live by it. I understand why but so often it looks like the art department just went mad. I understand that deakins is very aware if the use of practicals and motivational light and that is what makes this so so surprising. In reality they must just have decided that no one would notice. And inreality euphoria being a perfect example these days people get lit up by a whole Christmas tree of different coloured light sources with little or no explanation or motivation so does it really matter. Faking reality on demand is definitely a skill that everyone needs to learn perhaps in life as much as in lighting but to me this is as bizarre an issue as the eponymous use of volvo estate cars in every film ??? Again if you hadn’t noticed its a real thing. From a quiet place two to manchester by the sea, world war z to booksmart. Everyones significant other is a volvo. Truly bizarre. Meanwhile thanks again.
Interesting points here. Love it. I will check that scene and report back. Any idea on a rough time stamp in the movie? Also, Volvo being in a lot of movies is part of their advertising campaign!
@@BlaineWestropp1 @3mins and 53mins ncfom
Love this kinda of lighting breakdown. Subbed.
Thanks Steven!
Dude these videos are honestly so practical and helpful, and I love the style 👌🏻
Thank you! More to come :)
Congrats on 10k dude. well deserved.
Thank you! More to come!
Yeah bro! This channel is gold not just because of the knowledge and experimentation but because Blaine is genuine hilarious. Wake up his neighbors to tell them to turn their lights on for CZcams video lolol😂
😂 thank you!
Congrats on 10k! Loved seeing the slow progression of working through the set up.
Thank you thank you!
Awesome and informative as always!👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽🙌🏾🙌🏾good stuff.
Thank you 😇
Two videos I've seen. I'm now a subscriber. As I said in the other video, love your approach.
Thank you thank you :)
Gotta keep the trap house looking lit
dude, can I rent your komodo today?
i mean this 12 minutes video was simply a master class! thank you!
😇 thank you. I need to do some more of these!
@@BlaineWestropp1 lucky us! 👌🏽
Great explanation, loved the process.
Thank you :)
great explanation!!!
Thank you 🫡
Man this was fantastic! Good stuff!
Thank you :) 🫡
Learning a lot man. Thanks
im glad! thank you
Sweet, thanks man!
🫡
I think your final wide shot looked great, definite Fincher/Cronenweth vibes. I'm a beginner and often spending my nights up late like this on my own, when everyone else has gone to bed just hours and hours looking at my monitor, making small adjustments to the lights, and seeing what works and what doesn't. Lots of fun except when it's 2 or 3am and you have to just pack up all your gear that took ages to set up.
Thank you. Gaining a very good control over every light and what it’s doing is important. It’s easier when testing that it is on set, but the more you do it the quicker you are able to gain control on set and walk onto the set and know exactly what to do. Packing it up is tough. I enjoy leaving it out lol.
I just got some cinefoil for a setup this weekend. excited to use it!
Let me know how it goes!
You are incredibly impressive
Thank you Ashley 😇
great!
Thank you!
That is very useful. Actually I've spend lately 3 evenings to learn how to lit outside scene (campfire vlog, or something like that). Practice makes the master.
Love it. Practice definitely helps
Did I tell you, you could turn that monitor off?? Next scene.. So we lost our main actor 😭😭😭🤣🤣 love it!
😂😂😂 I’m glad some people appreciate this lol
"Did I tell you you could turn that monitor off?" i'm dead
😂😂😂
Love this breakdown! Did you learn most of this through on set activity, and how nighttime scenes would be rigged?
Thank you! Learned a lot of this on set yes. Experimenting also helps too!
Just came across your channel and this content is for me ! Also you lost your actor and I think I know why 😂 I feel this lol. Great content man ! New sub here now
Haha thank you so much! Some actors are tough to work with at times 😂
This video is lit
Literally 😂
Awesome stuff! Curious as to what you had your camera WB set to?
I see A lot of DPs shoot night scenes with warmer tones, so they either change camera WB, light WB, or do it in the grade.
Curious as to your thoughts on warmer interiors and what you did camera side here, as well as if you would touch anything in post. Thanks!
I am pretty sure camera was set to 5600 ish. There’s a chance I warmed it up in post a little but since the light was bouncing off warm tones in the room that may be responsible for some of the warmth. I will check in resolve and see what I did and report back!
Great practice. So important to improving your skills.
A few things that you might explore in the future:
1) Practicals are rarely daylight balanced, so you might try setting them somewhere between 2000-2800 next time. To me, this would have made the scene look more natural.
2) Not sure why you would put foil on the back of the practicals. The shadows/slashes of light that they create are the most “realistic” thing in your shot, so in my opinion you diminished the believability the minute you did that.
3) The backlight you added about half way through seemed out of place, especially since your shoulder created a slash of shadow across your neck - giving away the fact that it was a source light rather than the practical.
Thanks for sharing. These videos add a lot to the overall growth and development of future filmmakers.
hey thanks I only went daylight bc that is what I had, and if everything is daylight, you can balance the camera warmer and it will look very similar, minus any differences if you used actual tungsten. while foil is not the exact right material, cinefoil is used heavily for this exact purpose. I think the image looks wildly better without the very bright spots on the walls. you will see this done in tons of high end work. it is extremely common. sure you can have some light from a lamp on the wall or ceiling, but it is more often than not controlled similarly to how I did in this video. and as mentioned in the video.. I think I said 80% of the way there 🙂 a lot changes once you have the team there to polish that look.
@@BlaineWestropp1thanks for the reply. I would challenge your notion that practicals are manipulated this way, “A ton”, “extremely common”, and “more often than not.” Thats a statement that just isn’t supported by the body of images out there.
In fact, id confidently state that for every one example reference you find showing the way you’ve done it, I’ll show you 10 that embrace the light that ever person in the world would expect to see from a common lamp 😉
Keep it up!
ive been on a lot of projects that use cinefoil like this! but in image making there really aren't any rules so you can do whatever you want. I oftentimes do not like what a lamp with a bulb in it, uncontrolled will do when it is close to a wall. it doesn't look right to me on film, I prefer to control it. light to our eyes, is a lot different than what a camera can capture. we can see more. so if you have a practical that you want to read a certain way on screen, and it is blasting the wall with light, controlling that is a way that you can have the light read how you want it, without blowing out the wall. sometimes cinefoil is simply put on the top of the lamp, so that light doesn't spill out the top, but that you still get it on the wall. lot of ways to treat a lamp.
alternate universe lewis potts is that you? Great stuff Blaine! subbed. also.... where'd u get that shirt
Haha 😊. Shirt is from lululemon.
There's acc no fricken way. I just did a writeup on nighttime exposure. Always looking to learn more. Thanks for the vid!
where can I see the writeup!
@BlaineWestropp1 I think you're way beyond the level of the writing but I appreciate it it. I just spoke about creating pools of light, adding context by adding intercepting textures/shapes to background/foreground, most contrast being centred around the subject of focus, and directionality in the light to emphasise planes in the subject and scene
"We lost our main actor" 😂
She owes me one.
Looks great! Not sure if you meant to say "you were going to soften the key light so you were going to pull it further away" Make it larger or pull it closer to get it softer. Do the aperture B7 lights need to be connected to a local Wi-Fi to be able to control them?
I would not have pulled it closer. I would likely have pulled it further away and then softened it. Technically yes moving it closer makes it softer but it can make the falloff unnaturally rapid, which I do not want, in this scene at least. Apologies if I was unclear. b7s don’t need local wifi!
Damn.... I didn't want to like your channel. I like it lots. Subscribed.
😇
👍👍👍
🫡😎
Very helpful - thanks for the video 🎉 was the wide shot also at 50 mm?
Thank you, yea the wide and the coverage was all on the same 50mm lens.
@@BlaineWestropp1 you are the man 🙏
@@eike.zender 😇
@@BlaineWestropp1would love to see a "day for night" approach. What handheld monitor are you using?
I recently shot day for evening interiors and it was awesome. I will probably share some info about that some time soon. The monitor is a smallhd focus7 with built in teradek bolt 500 receiver. On camera is a smallhd cine7 with built in bolt 500 transmitter. Hot combo 👌
Hey , Great video as always !!!!! Are you using a hollyland mars m1?
Hey thank you! I am not using a hollyland mars. I am using a smallhd cine7 and focus7 with built in teradek bolt 500s.
@@BlaineWestropp1 hey Blaine, i would like to know if you record in REC 709 or slog 3 with the FX3
Slog3 always.
@@BlaineWestropp1 I’m using slog 3 and a 24-70gm and I struggle so bad to get a cinematic image , it looks more like a video than a film look , where could this come from ? Lens? Color Grading ? Lighting ?
czcams.com/video/3ymgtBElfXE/video.html
I'm gonna go look through your other videos but do you cover how you control and pair all of your lights to a single remote interface or are you having to work between multiple apps for each light configuration? What device are you using to control everything in this video? Just an iPhone Aputure app?
When I’m doing this stuff at home, I’m going up to each light and changing it. When I’m shooting stuff not at home it’s pretty much all controlled from iPad when it’s led and a multiple lights.
@@BlaineWestropp1 So you use different apps depending on the light brand or do you have a single interface that controls them all?
@DavidHaverty oh I just use whatever app they have. I pretty much only use the aputure app. But a lot of times I do shoots where gaffer has something that can control everything. I’d look into DMX control. I personally don’t know all the required pieces to control lights from different brands. If I don’t have a gaffer running everything I typically go up to the light fixture. You should join the discord I’m sure there’s people in there that can direct you.
so what focal length would be good for the over the shoulder medium shot such as the last one? a more natural like 35mm to 50mm? I pretty much know nothing of this field, but the process seems very iterative like in many other artforms.
in the scenario that I show in this video, id land somewhere around 65mm! but there is no right or wrong answer, that is just what I would do in that room!
Next time, I’ll make you pizza! 😂
Hahaha come to NYC I’m eating pizza now.
This looks great but please, show us the setup!
thank you! there are some looks at the setup in the 3d. I purposely try not to show the setup too much bc that is not the important part of this. the important part is seeing the light that is falling on the scene and can be made in so many different ways that I dont want to lock people into thinking about doing it the same exact way I did it bc that will just not work unless they somehow are shooting in my living room 😂
@@BlaineWestropp1 Thanks for taking the time to answer and for the clarification! it makes a lot of sense!
Viewing note: The letterbox black bars on your video prevent the image from being made fullscreen on ultrawide monitors. If you upload without any surrounding black, CZcams will properly fit the video to different size screens. In it's current form, black bars are added to the side of the video to fill a wide monitor when fullscreen, which in addition to your letterbox creates a full black border around the video, instead of filling the screen on even 1 axis. 21:9 ultrawide monitors are fairly common, and it is incredibly more pleasing to watch a video like this--especially one focused on visual imaging--without this shrunken fullscreen issue. If you had no letterbox, the image would fit my screen almost perfectly. The 2:1 aspect you have currently won't fit any screen perfectly. It may seen weird to deliver in straight 2.39:1 or 2:35:1, but this is CZcams, and it improves the viewing experience greatly for those who use monitors wider than 16:9 (or wider than 2:1 in this video's case).
Oh i am fully aware. I intentionally delivered with this aspect ratio and black bars. I don’t like how straight 2.39:1 on CZcams looks on an iPhone, and you lose some features on CZcams when delivering straight 2.39:1. I do know that that doesn’t help people with your screen though :/
@@BlaineWestropp1 Can you elaborate on what feature you lose?
Adding cards at the end of the video!
"promo sm" 👉