Week 8 - Testing Lighting Setups - The Return of Marcus

Roxana Baloiu
Nov 1, 2022
3 min read

Updated: Nov 13, 2022

Hands-on Exercise - Film and Digital Camera

We didn't have a quiz this week! We went over the technical things we missed the previous week. And then we did some hands-on lighting setups. I was on the camera setup team this week.

Cross-Key Lighting Setup - by Marcus

We were trying to create cross-key lighting in a restaurant scene where the only motivated lighting is a candle on the table.

Key lights are crossed
Soft-fill needed (probably bounced)
Overhead pepper light to motivate the lighting coming from the candle

The Setup...

The frame, what the camera sees...

The overhead Setup...

The 2 ARRI 650K lights acted as both Key for one subject and Backlight for the other. A bounce fill was added and held above the camera because the contrast ratio was too big. The bounce was a 4x4 white bounce. The light source was a 1K bounced in a U-shaped light pointed towards the 4x4 white bounce. We had to also add a grate to the light to cut it down a bit. This added extra fill light on both subjects.

The overhead pepper was rigged on the ceiling rig and wrapped with black wrap to create a very directional light source. It was also put on a dimmer to control the intensity of it.

A 2nd pepper was added and pointed towards the black curtain to give a bit of background texture.

The Result...

(This is photo of the tv screen and my phone cam takes really bad photos in low light but this give a bit of detail to what it looked like)

Behind the scenes of the day.

Jared's Lighting Setup

I was on art department for the most part of the exercise so I am missing some of the technical details of the setup.

The shot we were trying to recreate...

From the film Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

The Results...

How we recreated it

Camera

Red Camera on sticks with 50mm lens on it

Lighting

For the background...

- A practical on a dimmer, only it flickered a bit and had a tint to it

-Behind the fake wall, an ARRI 650K pointed at the wall and flagged with a black flag

in order to produce that light onto the "x"

For the middle and foreground

-a pepper light to give a little texture to the curtain background

-ARRI 650K bounced off of a 4X4 white bounce onto the wood wall

Art Department

We had to create 2 walls for this setup, one was a black curtain rigged on the ceiling rig

and the other was one of the wood walls available to us in the studio.

We got a practical from the editing suite to rig onto the desk in the background

We used tape to replicate the "x" on the wall.

We made both actors sit on black chairs

To lift the actors we put under their chairs 1/2 apple boxes

Behind the character in the foreground we added some apple boxes to recreate the clutter in

the original shot

The Overhead Plan

The Results...

Comments and Takeaways

Fun times with everyone. We found a giant lizard as a prop to use for Jared's setup. The energy in the class was nice and fun. It was a good experience. Liked the cross-key lighting effect, seems like an interesting trick to use on future shoots.