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Let’s put hardware aside for the moment and discuss the bigger question of what we want to accom- plish with lighting and how we go about it. What considerations do the director of photography and gaffer assess when making lighting decisions? To begin this discussion, we’ll first look at the larger objectives of lighting. With these objectives in mind, we’ll look at lighting strategy—how we arrive at the direction, color, and quality of the light for a given scene, and how we light actors’ faces. To implement our lighting strategy, we’ll also need to understand the technical tasks integral to working in a photographic media, including taking and interpreting light meter readings, using and controlling contrast, and considering the various factors that affect the working lighting level for a scene.
OBJECTIVES
What do we think about as we face an unlit set, before we select and place the particular lights we will use? Take a moment to consider the overall objectives of lighting. The classic textbooks1of the- atrical lighting design describe four objectives of lighting: visibility, naturalism, composition, and mood. Although the implementation of these concepts is a little different when we are lighting a close-up of an actor’s face than when we are lighting a stage, the same objectives apply to our work in motion picture and television lighting. These broad objectives form the basis for lighting decisions as we look at specific issues and techniques later in this chapter.
Visibility (or selective visibility)
A film without sound is a silent movie. A film without light is radio. Obviously, you must have light to expose the film. Exposure and contrast are two essential elements of selective visibility in cinematog- raphy. Much of the artistry of cinematography is in the control of lightness and darkness throughout the film’s latitude, selectively exposing objects and characters to appear bright and glowing, slightly shaded, darkly shaded, barely visible, or completely lost in darkness, as desired. Equally important is the direction of light. What angle of light shall we use to reveal the face? How much of the face do we wish to reveal? We’ll talk a great deal more about exposure and lighting angles later in this chapter.
1Stanley McCandless, considered the father of modern lighting design, first proposed many lighting concepts that are still
relevant today. His book,A Method of Lighting the Stage (1932) discusses the four functions of lighting: visibility, locale, composition, and mood. He also proposed the stage could be broken down into multiple lighting areas, and light could be manipulated in terms of intensity, color, distribution, and control (which will come into play in Chapter 6 of this book). The “four objectives of lighting” also appear in Richard Pilbrow’s classic lighting textbook,Stage Lighting (Studio Vista, 1970).
Set Lighting Technician’s Handbook, 4e. DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-240-81075-1.00005-2
Naturalism
Lighting helps set the scene; it locates the scene in time and space. The quality and direction of the light and the sources it implies are part of what makes a scene convincing. Often unconsciously, we recog- nize lighting that portrays time, season, place, and weather conditions. The lighting is evocative of the way the air feels and smells, whether it is dusty or clean, foggy or clear, cool or hot, humid or dry. In lighting a scene, the DP strives to evoke as much about the place and time as he or she can imagine. The crew won’t necessarily shoot a given scene at the time specified in the script. An inte- rior scene scripted as “sunrise” could be shot at any time of day or night. To create natural-looking lighting and keep things consistent, one must control the existing light sources and utilize or invent techniques to recreate realistic, natural lighting using artificial sources.
The opposite of natural lighting is lighting thatgives away the artificial setting to the audience: when the camera records multiple shadows cast on the walls and floor by an actor, when one can trace the diverging rays of light back to a lamp outside a window, when a shot shows “direct sun- light” coming into a room from two opposite directions or at different angles at each window.
Composition
Lighting is used as a means of emphasis and delineation. It helps separate the layers of the three- dimensional world on a flat, two-dimensional screen. It can also create purely graphic effects that contribute to the design of the composition.
Emphasis
The DP selectively emphasizes characters or elements, letting the lighting direct the eye within the frame. For example, imagine a wide shot looking down over the congregation in a large church. The shot immediately conveys the grandeur of the ceremony, but without further help, our eye wanders without a focus. An increased light level surrounding the figures at the front of the church draws the eye to our focal point of the scene, the couple making their vows at the altar. The light falls off on peripheral figures.
Separation
When the three-dimensional world is telescoped onto a piece of celluloid and projected onto a flat screen, our natural stereoscopic ability to detect depth is lost (unless the movie is in 3D). The cine- matographer can reemphasize depth in the image by accentuating the outlines of characters and objects, by contrasting the brightness and color of the different layers, and by moving the camera, which reveals depth with the relative motion of different planes.
A common problem is that when foreground and background share the same value, they blend together. The cinematographer may choose to remedy this with a backlight that creates a rim around the actor’s hair and shoulders, to separate her from the background. The amount of backlight needed depends on the reflectance of the subject and how pronounced an effect is desired. Backlight has long been an accepted convention in movies and TV, however a really bright glamorous backlight can also appear really artificial. Strong backlight can be made to look natural if it is well motivated. A bright window in the background of the shot helps in this type of situation; it provides a sense of source.
Backlight is not the only way to create separation. The cinematographer might choose to separate the foreground, middle ground, and background simply by lighting them to contrasting levels of
brightness. He or she can line up a highlight in the background so that the dark side of the actor’s face is against a light background. The highlight need not completely light up the background if the DP wants to maintain a sense of darkness. You can selectively throw a shaft of sunlight, or a pool of light around a practical, or a slash of light across some wall art, so that it lines up behind the actor in a pleasing composition, leaving contrasting shade around it. You can also use a light dose of smoke in the air to give substance to a translucent shaft of light, leaving the background in atmo- spheric dimness behind it.
Depth
Another important compositional element is depth. A composition that includes surfaces at various distances receding into the distance increases the shot’s sense of perspective and scale. If the shot includes some sense of space beyond the plane of the facing wall, outside a window or through an open doorway into other rooms, the gaffer can create planes of light and dark that recede deep into the picture. Depth offers nice opportunities for interesting lighting and composition.