Hi I’m Sareesh Sudhakaran.
In this video I’ll show why cinematographers
pick one lighting style the most.
A lighting style incorporates multiple elements.
How you light the face is the most important.
Whether it’s hard or soft lighting, what
direction it’s from, and what the lighting
contrast ratio is.
The contrast ratio is the difference in stops
between the key side and the shadow side.
You also have the difference between the foreground
and the background, which is one of the ways
cinematographers use to create depth and dimension
in a frame.
The most lighting style is the rembrandt lighting
pattern.
The light, whether hard or soft, is placed
at a forty-five degree angle to the side and
top.
This is very different to portrait lighting,
where you can pose a person to perfection.
In cinematography, actors move, faces look
left and right, and the camera moves as well.
But this system has one unique advantage.
When an actor is lit with the rembrandt pattern,
and they look away, the lighting becomes a
split lighting pattern.
This still looks good on most actors.
Another thing to remember is that lead actors
are almost always chosen for being photogenic.
They don’t have to look beautiful or whatever,
but they must pass the camera test.
The big secret that most people don’t tell
you at the beginning is, the lighting doesn’t
matter when you have a beautiful face in front
of you.
Pretty people look pretty in any lighting,
just as they do in real life.
The 45-degree lighting style lets actors look
away and even toward the light.
When they look directly toward the light,
the pattern becomes what is popularly known
as the Paramount lighting style.
A lot of close ups in the early days of cinema
were shot with the Paramount lighting pattern
because it brings a pretty face forward and
shows us all the beauty without major shadows.
This lighting is also extremely popular in
glamor and fashion photography.
So one light, positioned one way, gives us
three lighting patterns, and the actors all
look good.
What if they turn away completely?
Then the light becomes a backlight.
The backlight is most used in outdoor scenes.
The majority of cinematographers I’ve analyzed
over the years use backlight in day exterior
scenes.
It gives a great texture to everything around
the actor, but also doesn’t create shadows
on the actor’s face.
This gives cinematographers the freedom to
create light through bounce or additional
lights.
Another important element of a lighting style
is the contrast ratio of a face.
This is the difference in stops between the
key or lit side, and the shadow side.
The most popular average is two stops.
Stops gives enough dramatic moulding to make
faces three dimensional without over-dramatizing
the shot.
For really dramatic shots, the contrast ratio
can be pushed up, until the shadows are in
total darkness.
Gordon Willis often lit this way, with a very
high contrast ratio of 4-5 stops.
More about his cinematography in my understanding
cinematography series, which is only available
to members.
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more.
Back to contrast ratios, a smaller contrast
ratio than 2 stops, like one stop or zero
stops, which is basically flat lighting, is
also common in high key cinematography.
It works great for comedy.
Most films fall in the two stop contrast ratio
because it’s neither too low key nor too
high key.
The next big element in cinematography is
the contrast difference between the face or
foreground and the background.
The most common difference is one stop between
the foreground and background.
This allows the foreground to pop if you will.
The reverse is also possible, where the face
is in darkness and the background is purposely
lit.
The extreme case of this is the silhouette,
which is a very popular shot that you’ll
find in most films at least once.
Typically faces are lit normally, with Caucasian
skin tones going about one stop to two stops
over middle grey, dark skin tones falling
at middle grey or slightly lower, and everything
else in between.
The skin tone definitely dictates contrast.
E.g., if you have a caucasian actor, you can
expose normally and have the face in shadows
in a high contrast ratio, and still see into
the shadows.
But with a darker face, if you try the same,
the shadow region will completely go into
black.
So the lighting strategy must change, and
some fill light will have to be brought in
to get detail on that side of the face.
Modern trend to underexpose, as you can see
in many shows on Netflix, HBO, etc.
This is probably also due to the fact many
cinematographers don’t understand HDR, so
what looks fine on an HDR monitor is underexposed
on a normal TV.
The jury’s out on that one.
Contrast ratios, like everything else in cinematography,
are like colors and brushes.
Let’s take zombie movies.
You can have high key low contrast ratio movies
like Shawn of the Dead.
You can have medium contrast ratio movies
like Zombieland, or you can amp up the contrast
levels like you see in the original, Night
of the Living Dead.
The last major element of cinematography lighting
is hard or soft lighting.
There is no right or wrong here.
In the earliest days of cinema you had very
soft lighting, because the stages were lit
with sunlight falling through muslin or other
cloth.
Then you had German expressionism which influenced
film noir and the high contrast lighting style.
In the 60s and 70s lighting became sort of
mixed, but still more hard light.
You can see its influence in the works of
Roger Deakins and Robert Richardson.
Today a lot of low budget films tend to use
extremely soft light, similar to how it was
in the early days of cinema.
It’s easier and cheaper to light a scene
for soft light, and you can shoot quickly
because the actors can move around easier
without many lighting changes.
But that comes at the expense of using light
as an expressionistic tool.
They are all different brush strokes, depending
on what kind of cinematographer you want to
be.
The most popular lighting style currently,
that you’ll find in the majority of films
or web series, is the 45-degree lighting style,
either soft or hard, with a contrast ratio
of two stops on the face, and about one stop
from the background.
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