 Welcome to the Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today we are looking at top-down lighting. It's misunderstood, underused, but in an incredibly versatile way to light your subjects and be able to shoot entire scenes in one take. So top-down lighting is obviously lighting from the top. It gets a really bad rap, mainly because we all know that midday sun is a really terrible time to shoot, because when the sun comes straight down, it gives you these pits, dark pits in the eyes of your actors. It's a very unflattering light. It's harsh, not just harsh as a small source. The sun is very large, but it's very far away. So it gives you very, very sharp shadows. But also the direction of the light coming straight down from on top is really unflattering to most people's faces, and it's something that cinematographers try to avoid. But top-down lighting doesn't have to be like this. There are plenty of scenarios where top-down lighting can be a really valuable tool, can give you a lot of flexibility, a lot of options, and really serve the story. One of the reasons that top-down lighting is so good is that it's a very common way that things are lit in real life. Very often you have a light in the ceiling, comes down or illuminates the ceiling as a big source, and you get that top light, and it does give some really nice shape to the person's face. The problem is that if you have deep, sunk eyes like I do, you don't see the character's eyes. Now that can be a good thing if you're trying to create a sense of mystery, but most of the time we want to connect with the characters we're filming, and so we have to add a secondary eye light in order to balance out top lighting. We have this little gazebo in my driveway. We often eat meals out there, and I look across the table and see the other people, and it's a really fascinating light. It's really sculptural, it's really mystical. I really like the way that people, when they lean away from the center of the light, they fall into darkness, and as they lean forward they're revealed. Now I made a the light coming from the single tungsten bulb in the gazebo, and it was 0.4. So incredibly dark, and because I was filming myself for this test, I needed something like F5-6, so I did what filmmakers often do, which is augment the existing light with another light. I wanted something very diffuse, and so I had to pass it through a softbox with a grid to keep it off the walls, so I had to start with something very bright. Now I got hold of this January powerhouse. It's a 300 watt single chip LED. Very conveniently, it also has a bowens mount built into the body. You're able to get these really affordable softboxes on places like B&H that plug straight into the body of the light, so you don't have to use an umbrella. They come with the diffusion fabric and a grid. They weigh almost nothing, and they're really affordable. So I didn't even use the yoke on the powerhouse. I just hung it from the handle on the existing hook that's in the gazebo. Then I ran the power cable up the side, and I was able to get a really beautiful light. I had it at about 50% power to get my 5.6, and I was even able to drop the ISO to 400, which on the C200 really cleans up the blacks. So you see this first shot I did was just the light itself. Now it's quite soft, it's diffuse, but it really leaves those dark pits in the eyes, which does add a lot of mystery, does add a lot of almost menace. As you see as I lean back and lean forward, it's a great reveal for the character. This was a little too harsh though, so I got a piece of bounce board. It was a 2x3 piece of housing insulation, and just put it on the table in front of me at a slight angle. Now you can see how with this light, the reflection really then fills in those shadows, gives me a beautiful eye light, and really gives you a really cinematic single shot. Now the huge advantage of this is that that one light would work for the entire everybody sitting at the table. You may have to reposition the bounce somewhat, but it means that you could shoot a single take of this entire table going from person to person to person having a conversation and never see a light because the light's above us. Now this is the real power of 360 degree top-down lighting. It means that you can light the whole environment from above, maybe fill with some bounce from the side or from behind camera with a moving bounce, get really tremendous cinematic shots. For this next shot, I shot through the support of the gazebo and I was a little off-center. This gave me a more traditional, far-side key, still top-down and still filled with the bounce, but it meant that there was much more shaping going on because the far side of my face was lit, the near side wasn't, but still with the flexibility of 360 degree top-downs, 300 watts is an incredible amount of power for an LED. It's definitely brighter than the equivalent of a 2k tungsten. It's fully dimmable, it's daylight only, but the advantage of having such a bright light is you can pass it through diffusion and through a grid and still have plenty of punch even to compete with daylight. We could have shot, I could have, we could shoot a scene like this at dusk or twilight, even late afternoon and still have enough punch in the light to overpower the ambient and give a real sense of shape to the characters. Because I went through the trouble of building the softbox, I used it to light this so it's a four and a half foot octa box with diffusion and a grid that's just off to the side here and it's a really nice soft cinematic light as well. I didn't have enough space above me to do top-down lighting with this. It's about three and a half feet deep and my ceiling isn't high enough in the studio. It's another way to use a really bright LED passing through diffusion fabric to give you a really versatile way of lighting and shooting your scenes. That's my look at top-down lighting with the Generate Powerhouse. Thank you very much for watching. Check the description for links, leave the questions in the comments and I will see you next time.