guide: film realistic scenes at any budget level

Are you struggling to get your film scenes to look realistic, while feeling the squeeze from a limited budget? Then you’re in the right spot! In today’s blog post, I give you the secrets to achieving a frame that looks cinematic at any budget level.

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use existing lighting

“The easiest way to make it look like a grocery store is to leave it lit like a grocery store”. This piece of advice can mean a lot of things, but for this video it means to use the existing lighting whenever possible to begin shaping a scene. And, there’s two ways that I’ll use this advice in my frames:

First, since ambient sunlight is always cheaper than using additional lighting, I’ll use the sun to help light my shots whenever possible. To make using the sun easier, I’ll use an app like Photopills that shows me when and where in the sky the sun will be at the location I’ll be filming. That way, I know to be on side A of the building to get indirect lighting in the morning’s scenes, and on side B for the afternoon’s scenes. I can be sure I’ll be getting a nice soft fill through the windows without fighting ever-changing direct sunlight.

If I’m filming an outdoor scene, the app helps me place the sun behind the actors so that they’re lit with a “far-side” key. This results in a more cinematic look than if the scene were lit frontally. Notice how THIS same image looks much flatter when shot later in the day? I’ll drop a link to a video below explaining how to use a far-side key for more cinematic looking images.

An advantage of shooting outdoors is that it can be relatively inexpensive to do. Depending on how wide the frame is, I usually just use bounce to fill in the faces of the talent when backlighting them using the sun. A DIY way to do this is to buy a large piece of foam board from home depot and make what’s called a “bead board”. You can also accomplish the same thing using the white side of a 5-in-1 reflector. An advantage of the bead board is a softer quality of light, while the reflector definitely wins in the portability department. The white side will only bounce the sun so far though, so if the frame is too wide for the white side to be effective, then I’ll back waaaay up and use the silver, shiny side. And I can rig these with specialized clips if I don’t want to try to “Hollywood” them, or hold them steady throughout the take.

The second way I “leave it lit like a grocery store” is I’ll use the existing lighting and then supplement with my own. Here’s a scene from a 48-hr film fest that I recently lit. I worked with the team from Truce Media, shoutout, and this took place, you guessed it, in a grocery store! We had less than 90 minutes to get the frames we wanted from inside this location, and we needed to do it while they were open. So I brought in just two tubes to use as a key and rim light, rather than waste the team’s time and try to light the whole grocery store. With those tubes and a few extra pieces of kit called floppies that I used to block some of the harsh overhead lighting on our talent, I was able to have an efficient setup that allowed us to get all the scenes we needed.

Using lights from the location is a great way to keep the scene looking like it takes place where it’s being filmed. You can see actual grocery store lights in the background of these shots, and for this scene, that means using this lamp and some afternoon sunlight to bring up the room level. In order to keep the lamp from being too bright, I’ve added a dimmer so I can control the output. On location though, controlling these lights can be a bit more of a troubleshoot.

use practicals

This lamp is also what’s known as a practical light. Practicals are any lights that are viewable in frame. And they add realism to a scene in two ways: they establish a relative bright point in frame for the eye to balance everything else to, and they give motivation for other lights to be used that help fill in the scene.

By giving the eye something bright to look at, our brains go, “okay, that’s how bright this neon sign is, the talents skin tone is duller than that, that makes total sense because how could they be brighter than a neon sign.” Put another way, having a “brightest” and “darkest” point in the frame anchors the intensity of everything else in frame. A trick to making sure I’m not blowing out the highlights or crushing the blacks and losing color data is to use the false color on an external monitor to check exposure levels. If you don’t have an external monitor, check to see if your camera has an exposure limit setting so you at least know when you’ve gone too bright.

The second way that practicals add to the realism of a frame, is they provide motivation for off-camera lighting to be used. This lamp isn’t what’s outputting the tungsten light you see on the wall. That’s actually this panel light, that’s sitting just out of frame. But the combination of the two creates realistic-looking lighting in frame.

An inexpensive way to have a lamp in frame while having control over the output of the light is to use incandescent bulbs and a dimmer switch. If you have more money to burn or would like additional color options, you can buy yourself some “film quality” practicals to use instead. These lights come in a few different shapes and sizes, from tubes, to mini-LED’s to bulbs. All of these lights can output light in any color in RGB mode and can also be tuned across a wide range of color temperatures in CCT mode.

mix up color temperature

Oh hey, what a coincidence that that brings us to the third point, using multiple color temperatures can add realism to a scene in both obvious and subtle ways. If you think you need a refresher on what color temperature is, I’ve linked a video below so you can get caught up to speed.

Sometimes, a realistic-looking frame calls for a wide difference in color temperatures. By using a cool color temperature for the moonlight and a very warm tungsten one for the key light, I’m creating a complementary color look that looks cinematic, and feels realistic.

I can also use smaller differences in color temperature to get more subtle effects. Direct sunlight is measured at 5,600 Kelvin, but overhead blue sky is closer to 8,000 Kelvin. By using two lights to create this shot, a daylight balanced key light and a colder room fill light, I get a look that feels more like it’s light by mid-afternoon sun than if both lights were at the same color temperature.

I can also apply multiple color temperatures to a single source, by using two lights, two gels, and a diffusion rag as a key light for my subject. If I place a 1/4 CTB on one and a 1/4 CTO on the other, my subject will be lit by light that balances out to daylight, but alters slightly as my subject moves back and forth while giving a-roll.

Some lighting units, called bicolor or full-spectrum units, allow you to tune these values in at the twist of a dial for a more efficient workflow. If your lights output at only one color, you can use color diffusion gels that will either add warmth or cool them off. Click the video I’ve linked below to learn how to use gels as part of a more comprehensive approach to using color theory in your films.

I’m using five lights to mix color temperature in this frame, not including the ambient sunlight. The first two lights are the tungsten-colored practical bulb and panel light combination I talked about earlier. These are adding the warm, orange glow to the left edge of the frame. The third light is this 2′ infinibar. I’ve set the color temperature on this to match the previous two, and it’s adding definition to my cheek on the shadow side of my face and my shoulder. The next is my key light, where I’ve used both 1/4 CTO and 1/4 CTB gels inside the modifier. This adds some movement to the color temperature on my skin tone as I bounce across frame. Lastly, I’ve got a point source with a fresnel attachment adding the hard shadows to the background of the frame. I’ve placed a 1/2 CTO gel in front of this so that it feels more like afternoon sunlight.

mix hard & soft lighting

These hard shadows bring me to my fourth point, and that is to turn up the realism by having both hard and soft lighting in frame.

One example of how this lighting gets used over and over in Hollywood is sunlight streaming through a window onto the talent. There’s multiple ways to light this, depending on the tools on hand. To have the most control over the exposure levels throughout the scene, I’ll achieve this with two sources of light, one hard and one soft. Placing barn doors on the hard source and a grid on the soft source gives me control over the spill of each light so that I can aim them more easily. A more cost-effective way is to use one hard source with a silk frame to diffuse the light and add softness. Silk frames come in two industry-standard sizes, 18×24 and 24×36, with a frameless edge to ease the transition between the hard and soft shadow area.

I can control the amount of hard and soft light affecting the talent by changing where I position the silk. Closer to the light will have the silk affect more of the overall spread of the light, but will be less flattering on the talent. The closer I position the silk to the talent, the softer the light will be, but then I need to be careful about shadows from the flag itself appearing in frame.

An even more cost-effective way to achieve this effect is to use a white sheet instead of a silk diffusion screen. If I’m really tight on a budget, I can even achieve this effect by timing when the sun will be in place and proper positioning of some white window sheers from Walmart.

Mixing hard and soft light in other parts of the frame also helps to achieve a more realistic look. This hard beam raking across the wall behind me isn’t real sunlight. It’s this point source light modified with a fresnel. The “sun beams” this light casts behind me also give reason for which side I place my key light on. To the viewer, it’ll feel more natural for me to place the key light on the side where my “sun” is.

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– This blog post contains only Tyler’s opinions about G&E, gaffing, and LED lighting, and was not reviewed or paid for by outside persons or manufacturers

– Tyler Trepod is a freelance owner/operator gaffer of a Grip & Electric truck based in Denver, Colorado and serves the Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, & Fort Collins markets