Lighting Techniques In General.

Good lighting will make a film look a lot better than if it wasn't considered at all.

The key lighting set up is 3. lighting. This is a back light, a key light and a fill light. It's very easy to do in the studio because there's lots of room and lots more control over lighting.

The backlight is a light in the back of the shot and the idea is to make an outline behind the actor/object in the view, creating depth and separating the focus from the background.

The key light adds texture onto the face. It's normally quite a direct beam and a hard light, and it creates shadow on the face to make it a little more interesting.

A fill light is a soft light that fills the room.

You could add colour by putting coloured gels over the lighting to alter the colour. Even phone lights could be used to alter the colour.

This set-up should be stuck to as much as possible, but you could reflect things off mirrors by turning the lights towards the mirrors and just having the reflection shine on the focus of the image. It's subtle, but it'll take the edge off it a little.


When filming outside, too much light looks fake. Naturalistic light isn't designed to make people look good, whereas a 3. lighting set up is. With daylight, you should work with the sun, or use a reflector to make the sunlight bounce around.

At night, you could use something like car headlights, or street lamps for example, because the lights that we could hire from the college need to be plugged into a wall socket.


To create a darker tone - like I'm trying to do for my short, single camera drama - I could possibly adjust the brightness by bringing the brightness down in editing, and raising the colour gradient of dark blue.

Use minimal lighting with single point lights, having it on one side of the face to get the shadows, or behind with darkness to just get an outline of the actors, but if it was pointing to the background, you would get a silouhette. If you put a light below someone like a laptop screen or a candle, it'll also create a somewhat spooky effect. A light directly over someone would create shadows under the eyes and could look quite menacing.

A beam of light in a room with no windows, a direct beam of light with someone walking through would make them appear and disappear again.

If you turn the lights off completely and just start one light up at a time to figure out how it looks and keep doing so until it is perfect.


In that scene from Doctor Horrible, there'd be one strong backlight, and then another key light, like a lamp that is in front of him but pointed across and not at him so he walks into it. Then he turns around, and it's behind him instead.

Some places have cheap disco lights which could look like alarm lights flashing, or otherwise, someone could hold a torch and a red gel, turning it on and off to create the same effect.


Taking a DSLR with a 50m lens would allow you to shoot in lower lighting conditions better. However, it's very tricky to keep things in focus with this set up. It's a good idea to book a camera out and test out the conditions next week in the studio to see how low I can get the lighting and still be able to film.