The Cinematic Lighting Trick Hollywood Uses
OVERHEAD AMBIENCE
What exactly is ambience and why does it help to make images feel a bit more cinematic?
If we start with an ordinary room during the day without any film lights we can see that the main source of light is coming from the sun and passing through the door and windows.
However, light doesn’t only travel in perfect straight lines. Whenever a light source comes into contact with a surface it bounces off it. If it’s a light surface like a ceiling or a white polyboard quite a lot of light will get reflected back and if it’s a dark surface like a grey wall or the black side of a polyboard a much smaller amount of light will be bounced.
Bouncing light off a white polyboard
Bouncing light off a black polyboard
So here we have a natural ambience, where sunlight enters the room and bounces around off the white walls and ceiling.
To keep a nice level of information outside and avoid blowing out our background to white I’ve lowered exposure on the camera using an ND filter. However, this now leaves our interior looking very dark and a bit too underexposed - which means the natural ambience from the sunlight bouncing off the ceiling isn’t strong enough.
We can fix this by filling in the room with overhead ambience from an artificial film light.
Ambience helps make footage look a bit more filmic and less video-y because it allows us to preserve information in the bright parts of the highlights as well as lifting the detail in the dark areas.
BOUNCING THE LIGHT
There are two main ways to add an overhead ambient light source - the easy way and the more tricky way.
The easiest way to do this is by taking your light source, putting it on stand and angling it towards the ceiling. Here I’ve set up a 500B as well as Nanlite’s new PavoSlim 240C. The stronger the source outside is, the more ambient light you need to add inside to raise and balance the exposure level of the interior. So here I need quite a lot of artificial ambience.
The colour of the ambient source should be the same as the natural ambience. In this case we have sunlight which is about 5,600K, so I’ve set our light sources to the same value.
Bouncing light does three things: it decreases its intensity, it softens the light and it lifts the overall exposure in the room.
Without overhead ambience the shadows will be deeper and more crushed. With the artificial ambience there will be more detail in the shadows and the subject will have more of a fill light.
If you want to change the direction that the light bounces in you can do so by rigging a reflective surface - this could be a reflector plate, a polyboard, or even a piece of white card.
For example you could use a top bounced source to create more of a shadowy low key look with an edge light. To do this I rigged a silver polyboard on a c-stand with a polyholder, angled downwards, and placed it behind and above her so that it’s more of a backlight. I’ve then bounced a 500B into it. This both lifts the levels of ambient light indoors and gives a harder edge light to the hair, shoulders and side of the face.
RIGGING THE LIGHT
The one disadvantage of this bouncing method is that we don’t have much control over the spill. In other words the light won’t be concentrated into a single beam of light and will spread around the room.
This brings us to method number two - rigging an overhead source to the ceiling.
This technique of rigging top lights to ceilings was famously used by Conrad Hall in movies like The Godfather. Rigging a diffused toplight with skirting makes the light source fall directly downward onto a specific area, limiting it from spilling across the entire room.
This keeps the walls and background dark, while the character under the source is brighter in a pool of light.
This setup is a bit more tricky than just bouncing the light as it requires either rigging the fixture to a polecat, or using a stand with a boom pole.
Here I’ve rigged a polecat by extending it across the room then locking it. To this I’ve added a super clamp to secure a Nanlite Pavoslim 240C and its ballast onto the pole. I’ve added the softbox to the front of it with a diffusion layer to soften it.
Then to control the spill and prevent the light from hitting the back wall too much I’ve created a bit of a DIY makeshift skirting using black material - which channels the light into falling directly downward.
SHOOTING 360 DEGREES
One reason that many DPs choose to use this technique is because it allows them to point the camera anywhere around the set, other than the ceiling, without seeing the source of the light.
This way, cinematographers can fully light the entire space in a set, rather than composing a specific shot, getting an actor on a certain mark and lighting only that spot.
Actors therefore have more scope to change their blocking during a scene, and directors have leeway to easily change or add shots once they have started shooting.
If you look at behind the scenes photos of Hollywood studio sets inside soundstages you’ll almost always see these diffused toplights rigged over the set to create artificial ambience.
Rigging lights high up in a sound stage also creates more distance between the light sources and the set - which means the light falls off in intensity, making it a bit softer.
Not only does ambient top lighting feel a bit more real, but, for large long form productions, it also means these fixtures can be pre-rigged and then left there, out of sight, for the remainder of the shoot.
So, every time a scene needs to be shot on that set, the lights can be switched on, remotely dimmed and set to a preset colour temperature with a DMX board - without needing to spend time setting up and positioning the lights each shoot day.
This is a big time saver and provides consistent illumination which is easily repeatable and controllable.
NIGHT LIGHTING SETUP
Now that we know what overhead ambience is, let’s break down two examples of how we can use it to make our footage a bit more cinematic. For the first scene I’m going to do a night interior set up to show how toplights can be rigged out of sight to add a gentle ambient fill to a couple of rooms, creating pockets of light and shadow in different areas.
First I’ll rig two top lights. One in the middle of each room. I’ve used the 240C for the final larger room and a 120C for the interleading passage. I’ve rigged these to a polecat and run the cabling along the pole and out of sight - but you can also power them with batteries if you want to shoot completely 360 degrees cable free.
In this first room I’ve used another 60C Pavoslim which I’ve bounced into the ceiling. I’ve set these lights to 5,600K - while the camera is set to 4,200K. This means our ambience will appear a little bit cool.
This night time ambience lifts the level of detail in the shadows so it doesn’t get too crushed to complete black and allows us enough light to expose the scene at 800 ISO at T/2.4 on the lens.
To create a bit of warm, cool contrast and to give some backlight in our final landing position, I’ve added a practical bulb to the last room. This is a Nanlite 10C LED which I can run with a powerbank. I’ve dimmed it and set it to a warm colour temperature.
Now it’s looking a bit better but the windows feel flat and lack depth, so I’ve set up a 500B fixture outside the glass door and windows and warmed it up with a sodium vapour gel, creating some warm textured light.
So if I do a handheld walkthrough of the shot it’ll look something like this. Note that we can move the camera through the entire space without seeing any film lights.
If we start with just the practical it will look like this. Then this is with the warm window light added. Notice how the shadows are mostly crushed to black. Then we add the final ingredient, our overhead ambience, and there we go. We can now see some light detail in the shadows, while still keeping a dark look and without blowing out any highlights.
DAY LIGHTING SETUP
So, that’s an example of using ambience for a night scene, now how about a day scene.
The first thing I’m going to do here is only look at the brightest part of the frame and set my exposure so that it retains some colour and information without blowing out.
If you want a super high contrast look something like this might already start to look quite good. We’ve got a nice natural key coming through the window on the far side. However, since I want this shot to have a brighter, high key look I’m going to add some ambience to fill in our character so it’s less of a silhouette.
To do this I’ve taken a 500B and bounced it into the ceiling, positioning and angling the source so that it fills in the side of the face with shadow which is closer to the camera. As we’ve mentioned it also lifts the exposure of the darkest parts of the frame, unveiling a bit more detail.
Then I’m going to rig the 240C as a backlight behind the character from above by rigging it to the polecat. This will create a subtle rim or edge light and provides just a little more separation to the shot. Here you can see how it creates a highlight on the edge of the hair, side of the face and shoulder.
So there we go. This is where we started without any lights. Then we can turn on our ambient bounce which lifts the space with a soft light that gets rid of the dark shadows on the face. And then we add the backlight to create a slight edge on the hair.