Interview lighting set-up analysis

Lighting is a key part to any production. Whether your shooting a short film, documentary or promotional, bad lighting can seriously impact on the final product. Unlike some things in the creative media industry, bad lighting can be picked up by anyone.

One example of the importance of good lighting is when filming interviews. To prove this point, we took an interview set up and did a few before and after shots, the first without lighting or just the lighting from the room. This is what we started with:

As you can see, the subject is completely dark, excluding the limited light to her left-side. This might be a good set-up for a mysterious character in a film but for an factual interview it's no good. We are also getting that orange look due to the lighting type, as well as what's in shot (Her jumper, the desk and walls). This would be useless if we were to shoot like this. To bring up the light enough in post would drop the image quality dramatically. The first thing we wanted to do was get some light on her face so we bounced a light of the white wall that is just off camera on the left. Bouncing it off the wall defused the harshness of the light. This was the result:

As you can see, we can now see the subjects face better and she is more separate from the environment. However, we want the subject to be more evenly lit. The final thing to add, to bring up her features and to make her more evenly lit, was a light over to her right. This completes the interview look we were going for. The final result looking like this:

Contrasting the first and last image, you can see the huge difference that lighting makes to the set-up. From an image that was dark and dingy we get something that looks clean and professional. Same camera, same position different lighting. Personally, I would have liked to have added a light to the back left, putting the light high up angled directly at the subject. This would have given a crown like glow around the top of her head which would separate it from the background.

You get the best lighting results when you can control everything about them. A good example of when this is used is in studios. A studio space can have a huge, almost endless amount of variation on lighting set-ups. From hot-lights to soft-boxes to using a huge sheet as a means of defusion the lighting world really is your ouster. An example of the type of shot you can get in a studio space is this screenshot:

As you can see, the subject is very well lit. The light behind her is giving a nice glow effect to her hair while a light to her right hand side is giving some detail to her features. You can clearly tell where you are meant to be looking with your focus being drawn towards the subject. That is down to the use of composition and, you guested it, lighting.