Start Learning Cinematography | Cinematic Lighting 101 - How to Light Faces | 3 Cinematic Lighting Setups

Stay tuned to the end for a chance to win a prize! In this episode of 4MFS, we present Valentina with three different people and ask her what is the best way to light each of their faces. We are lighting for a fashion video, beauty ad, and liquor commercial. Valentina takes color contrast, quality of light, and genre into consideration to produce the most pleasing image. We’re also joined by Kevin Reyes, guest DP extraordinaire, who is here to lend his expertise in fashion cinematography. We are using a luxury downtown LA loft for our set, and we have three people we need to light - a young black male, an Asian woman, and an elderly white gentleman. The most important factor for each of them is whether we light them with a hard or soft key light. For the first setup, we decide to go with a hard light because we want to emphasize the texture in darker skin tones. Valentina attaches a fresnel to the LS 300d II in order to spot the light and get the shape that she was looking for. In the second setup, we set up the softest light available to us - a Nova P300c with a DoPChoice Snapbag Octa 5’ - to brighten every feature of our talent’s face. One of the advantages of a big soft source is the beautiful eyelight that it creates. Lastly, we switch back to a hard light for our gentlemen in the liquor ad, but we make sure that it’s small and concentrated to keep the lighting dramatic. We’re also shooting the scene in black-and-white, so that the audience can focus on the texture of his skin. We shot with the Canon C70 and Rokinon Xeen primes to start off with a crisp, sharp image. That way, we can add our desired lens filters such as pearlescent and black satin in front for less contrast and more blooming. They also smooth out the skin and hide imperfections. Other lighting techniques to consider are back light and how you want to separate your subject from the background. Having a backlight is almost always a must-have, but having gels on hand to color them can add to the visual interest of your film, especially when it comes to fashion and beauty. Want more free lighting and cinematography tutorials? Subscribe to us so you never miss an episode: https://goo.gl/QwazdM Follow Kevin on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kevinreyes/ Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 1:51 - Concept 2:59 - Camera 3:55 - Fashion Lighting 8:06 - Breakdown #1 8:36 - Beauty Lighting 11:11 - Breakdown #2 11:41 - Black-and-White 12:44 - Commercial Lighting 15:57 - Breakdown #3 16:27 - Outro 🎥Subscribe to Aputure: https://www.youtube.com/aputurephoto https://www.facebook.com/aputure https://www.instagram.com/aputure.lighting/ https://twitter.com/AputureLighting 🎥Free Cinematography Lessons From Experts! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjnBD0tWOQ1-jsuV5e_jlOvtjr3nY7S9a 🎥Connect with the A-Team! Valentina - Host/DP: https://www.instagram.com/valentina.vee/ Moses - Producer: https://www.instagram.com/moses_israel/ Tue - Director: https://www.instagram.com/tuezzles/ Jucel - Cinematographer/Editor: https://www.instagram.com/jucelandrin_/ 🎥GET APUTURE GEAR: http://lddy.no/3dkv 🎥MUSIC: http://bit.ly/pb_aputure Summary: Aputure's YouTube channel provides free high quality cinematography, lighting, and filmmaking educational content to help you take your film projects to the next level.