 Hey what is up my name is Rubidium. Today we are looking at light beams. How to get them, how to create them, how to capture them on film. So people that watched this channel probably remember a couple of weeks ago I did a daytime interior setup where I had some kind of cool light beams going on. They weren't really as good as I wanted and it kind of drove me nuts when I was like playing around trying to create this really strong front of light beam. So a lot more research and a lot more testing on how to get the best light beams. There are three things to remember when getting a really strong light beam. The first is the beam has to be coming towards camera. It can't be facing away. There has to be atmosphere in the air. Light itself is invisible. It's only the things that the light is reflecting off whether that's haze or smoke or dust. The third thing is that light beams can only be seen in contrast to what's behind them. You can't have a light beam in front of a bright background. You just won't see it. So you need a bright white light coming in front of a dark background. The perfect example of light beams and the best way to remember it is in those old movies where you see a person sitting in a movie theater and you see the light beam from the projector going towards the screen. There's a reason that people are smoking in those cinemas. It's so that you can get a cool light beam from the projector to the screen. In this case, the light beam is coming towards camera. There's smoke in the room atmosphere and the movie theater is almost totally dark so you can see the separation of the beam. One issue I had recreating these was with the beam coming towards camera, you also get lens flare or the exposure of the light source itself. If you don't want the light source shooting into the lens, you have to flag off the light source or have it out of frame. But that can be tough because the strongest, most visible area of the light beam is the part that's coming straight out of the light. Because of the inverse square law, the light beam is really visible as it leaves the fresnel and gets less and less visible very quickly. So you either have to have a really, really strong light, a really, really dark area or a really, really atmosphere filled room. By using these three elements in tandem, you can create the light beams you want. When in doubt, you should start with the strongest light you have shooting it into the room that is dark as possible while you can still see what you're actually lighting. And then thirdly, have as much smoke or haze in the room as you can get away with before it starts to look ridiculous. Very quickly, people over haze sets and it looks like there's a fire going on. It takes a lot of skill and experience to use the right type of smoke and haze to be able to see light beams at atmosphere without overwhelming the audience. One thing I don't have that I would like is a hazer as opposed to a smoke machine. I have the smoke in the can and the sort of $40 hardware store smoke machine. Rosco makes a thing called a hazer. They're $1,500. Be really cool to rent one and actually see what we get. They show up on a lot of Shane Hurbert's videos. I think he owns one. He puts haze in almost every scene he does with really great effect. It really elevates the image. So that's my quick little tutorial on light beams and how to create them. Hopefully people out there have some added comments or questions about it. Subscribe if you want more of these videos and I will see you next time.