Cinematography Tutorial 1: Basic Lighting and White Balance

Hey Everyone!

This is the first of hopefully many instructional videos on the finer points of film making. These are mainly aimed at the scouts in Boy Scout troop 457 who are taking my cinematography merit badge, but all are welcome to watch and get free lessons ;)

This is the first one of these I made, so they will be better in the near future.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• cinematography
• instruction
• video
• film
• help
• color
• gels
• boy
• scouts
• 457
• explosions
• posters
• awesome

[ukcameraman]

that interview style lighting looks terrible, look at that fat shadow! Look at that sheen off the poster.

[Inept77]

Like I said, I only had two lights at the time. If I had a third, you wouldn't see that "fat shadow" and awful lighting in general.

[impavido]

I am putting some serious cash behind a short film in the coming months. I have no formal education in film or cinematography, and your tutorials are helping me with the basics to make sure I can communicate what I artistically want to those working with me.

Thanks for letting us leech off of your tuition Brian!!!!

[Inept77]

Haha no problem.

Also, don't spend a ton of money on it. There's ton's of cheap tricks you can use to keep the budget low.

[Inept77]

Thanks. And it's just a little film festival called Sundance.

lol not really. It's the school film fest down here, Falcon Film Fest. It's small, but the prizes are awesome

[kanug]

thanks for the knowledge

[JDBCreations]

So you can manually white balance your camera by zooming into a white piece of paper or poster board... but is that all you have to do? I'm pretty sure you have to press something to set it. The camcorders I have seem to have pretty unsophisticated white balance controls as well as any other kinda manual control. What kinda camcorder do you use? What kind do you recommend that I buy? What kinda HD cam?

[MayerEO]

thank you!

[jmoriarty001]

The problem is the distance from the wall. Professional interviews are done in larger rooms with longer lenses. This way light doesn't bounce off of close walls giving deep blacks and singularity in each light. A two light interview works great in those situations. Bounce light is also very key as well as mixing different kinds of hard and soft light. Great vid. Keep up the good work, it will pay off.

[hazemabdulrab]

great vid

[zleepyjan]

Thank YOU :D

[darkkon000]

thanks man!

[impavido]

Well, the main reason I am putting money behind is is because I and my colleague have found unpaid volunteer actors very unreliable. I want to get some of the best local actors competing for roles, so I can get the best actors available to me.

The rest of the budget will be equipment rentals. A large portion of the film takes place in a moving car. So an exterior camera harness and such is going to be needed. And we will probably tow the car on a trailer. So we can safely let the crew act.