 Imagine rolling up to your shoot and you find out that you have no lights to use. Maybe you thought that the studio you rented would come with lights, but you only have two hours to shoot and your model has just been sitting here waiting for you. Now the only silver lining is that you remember that you have one light in the back of your car, but one light only. What do you do? Welcome to the One Light Challenge. Yo, it's Herman here with Artlist and today we'll be placing myself into one of the worst situations possible on set to see if I can still film something adequate. But before we begin, I want to let you know that we'll be having an awesome giveaway at the end of the video, so make sure to stick around until then. Now for this challenge, my first handicap will be to film something under a time constraint of two hours because limited time is a reality we all suffer from as creators. The second handicap is a bit more fun or at least fun for you to watch because I'll be under the pressure of trying to film something with only one light. Now why am I doing this? Because pressure allows us to come up with our best ideas or crush us into utter defeat. Been through that a few times. Whether we can't afford more lights because we're just starting out or we face a disaster on set, I mainly want to prove that your equipment shouldn't limit you from making captivating videos. Then I'll be sharing what I did if I'm not crushing to utter defeat. So let's go. All right, so we have the lovely Mark over here who will be our model and we have another Mark who is behind the scenes right now. This is the light that we will be using for this challenge. It is the Amaran 200X. We're going to be setting up the timer for two hours and the clock is going to begin right now. By the way, I've never shot with just one light before and the guys on set have no idea. I didn't know how everything would turn out and your guess was as good as mine. I was mostly nervous that I wouldn't even have a video by the end of this. When you are placed in a chaotic situation you have no control over, the easiest thing to do is freak out. But my years of experience in freaking out has taught me that the more prepared you are beforehand the smoother you can navigate the situation. So let's go through some lighting techniques I used in this shoot so that you too can feel prepared and fall back on these when you don't know how to light your scene. Now the best part about lighting techniques is that you can apply them to any light you have whether it's an 800 watt HMI light or a ring light or the flashlight on the back of your phone techniques stay with you in your head. You can lose equipment but you can't lose your mind unless you're the one doing this light challenge. A disclaimer this is a work light in between our shots so that mark behind the camera can see what's going on but we do turn them off when this camera is rolling. Now the simplest thing you can do to change the look of your scene and subject is to shift the direction of your light. Aiming your light from different directions will convey a different mood to your viewers. For example pointing the light from behind and only seeing a silhouette of the subject conveys a sense of mystery because we don't see who this person is. How do we even know it's a person? Maybe it's a robot. Pointing the light from the front shows more of our subject's face and seeing them unconcealed from shadows makes it feel less moody and dramatic. We also get to see that our subject is indeed not a robot or are they? Pointing a light directly from the top makes it look dramatic again as we see less of our subject's face. This works amazingly for interrogation scenes where we find out our subject really is a robot and ask why they've been pretending to be human all along. These are just a few examples I used for the challenge but I encourage you to try placing whatever light that you have in different directions to experiment. Another really, really important factor to consider is the quality of your light. Now I don't mean the build quality of your light but the actual light itself that hits your subject. This looks like someone just opened the garage door. I can feel it too. It feels like the sun. The light can either be soft or hard and how you can tell is by looking at the shadows of what the light is hitting. Hard lighting will create defined shadows that are sharper than Ryan Gosling's jawline and is usually achieved by just using one single point light. Soft lighting creates a smoother transition into your shadows which is much more flattering to look at just like Ryan Gosling. But to achieve soft lighting you'll need tools to diffuse the light. Now you can use light modifiers or grids with diffusion cloth but the most budget friendly option is probably just throwing a shower curtain in front of your light. For this challenge I used a soft box that attaches to the light because I think soft boxes are the easiest way to get soft lighting in tight spaces. In most scenarios I just throw this whole thing on a stand turn it on and I instantly get nice lighting on my subject's face. In fact that's what I'm using right now. Off camera there is that soft box and it's great because my office is small. I did however take off the soft box for a couple shots where the focus wasn't on the subject's face. So we are just introducing the smoke machine so that we can kind of paste up the set just a little bit and it'll have a nice little layer of diffusion and that's another way of creating some variance while you're still shooting with one light. Hard lighting usually feels very intentional but it's a great way to add variety and create a gritty film noir atmosphere. Hard lighting also works great with what we'll talk about next which is shaping light. Still this much time an hour. I still got this many shots to go. Now imagine your unlit space being a canvas and the lights being your paint. If you only have one light to paint with it might be tough to make your scene look interesting but just like how you wouldn't paint your entire canvas one solid color you can shape your light so that you can only light the areas that you want. In my challenge I set up a flag to cut off the top of my subject so that it would bring attention to the bottom half where the watch is. With hard lighting the flag makes a pretty distinct line which was a stylistic choice and definitely not because I forgot to throw the soft box back on the light. There is so much you can do with shaping light and so many ways to do it but it's one of the fundamental ways of creating depth and introducing texture into your scene. The most frequent thing I do is flag my light off the background so that it's darker. That way the subject is brighter and becomes what the viewer will focus on. For this challenge I would want to make sure none of the light spills onto the black backdrop or walls so that it feels like the subject is in this black abyss. You probably wouldn't want to play hide and seek here. Something I didn't learn in film school was that lights don't just have to stay in one place. In most narrative scenes I'd usually light a scene in which actors could freely move around in and lights didn't have to move with them. But I would watch product videos or fashion promos and wonder how the shadows would move around in such a dynamic way. So I took a flashlight, I sweeped it over an object and I realized I could do the same thing with any light. So for this challenge I placed my light on a c-stand loosened up one of the knobs and swung the light from side to side. Swinging the light like this has been one of my favorite ways to add movement to the scene. Especially if your subject is stationary or if I'm shooting a static object. Just be careful not to swing it into anyone's face. Been guilty of that one. Now the last thing I did to the light for this challenge was simply change the color of it. I wanted a bold color like red to kick things off and grab the viewer's attention. But because my light can only change color temperatures and doesn't have RGB built in I had to slap a color gel on my light. At least that was the plan. But I lost all my color gels on the day of the shoot which I guess is pretty in line with this challenge of adapting to unexpected situations. So I simply changed the color in post-production. But I highly encourage using color gels so that you can see exactly what you get right away on set. Now the awesome thing about gels is that you can put them in front of pretty much any light you use to change their color. Just like the other techniques I used colors are just another tool in building your mood and atmosphere. If I wanted the vibe of the video to be a lot more calm I'd probably throw something like a blue color gel on top. Using yellow could feel happier and playful. Just be careful not to overdo the colors unless you're throwing an underground challenge. Oh that's great. Oh that's the timer guys. That is all the time we have, two hours is up. We'll see how we did with just one light but that's a wrap so let's check it out in the edit. After filming everything it was time to put it all together in the edit. The first thing I usually do is look for music before I even open up my program because music is just such an important part in setting the pacing and the tone. I just make sure to choose the right filters for what I have in mind like the mood and the genre and in less time than it takes to say one light challenge I usually find my perfect song. The rest of the edit becomes way less stressful when the music feels like it just does most of the work for me. Here comes the moment of truth with all of the lighting techniques that I shared with you. Let's see how I did in two hours with only one light. There you guys have it. That was the one light challenge. Let me know how you think that I did in the comments below. Although it was stressful this was a lot of fun to do because when I first started making videos one of the most unexpected skills I developed was making excuses. I would tell myself that my videos would look better if I just had this lens or I had that light but the real reason is because I don't have a beard. Jokes aside it was when I watched other creators produce amazing results with limited resources when I realized that the tools aren't as important as your creativity. In fact limiting ourselves lets us think creatively about how to make the most out of what we have. So I hope that watching this challenge encourages you to go out and shoot with the tools that you have and the knowledge that you're now equipped with. Thank you all for watching and as I promised earlier we are holding an insane giveaway. We are giving away three yearly creator pro subscriptions to our list. Now for your chance to win comment and tell us about the hardest challenge you had to overcome in one of your shoots and we'll be announcing the three winners next week on our instagram stories so make sure to follow us there. The links are in the description so check that out. Also make sure to subscribe to the artless channel if you want to see more videos like this and hit the bell notification so you don't miss the next one. Thank you all for watching and I will see you in the next video.