This course is designed to teach you advanced lighting techniques and philosophies for cinematography and film professionals. Our goal is to move beyond the basics of lighting, and look at practical examples of lighting methods you can apply to real world scenarios to solve more difficult lighting challenges. Lighting for film is a balancing act, between the visual aesthetic you want to achieve, and the practical limitations of placing light in space. We will assume that you are familiar and proficient with the fundamentals of light and photography, understanding how exposure, aperture, and camera sensitivity work, how to measure light, the definitions of terms such as key and fill, and that you are looking to build on your base of knowledge for more advanced lighting techniques. We will not cover brands and types of equipment, as these lessons will be valuable regardless of what grade of equipment you have access to. When lighting a film, you will almost never have exactly the tools you wish you had, and these lessons will teach you how to achieve your visual goals regardless of your practical limitations.

This light tells us very little about the subject and what they are feeling. Lighting them is our opportunity to bring the subject’s inner workings outward, and to tell the audience what is happening below the surface, using only light.

When approaching a scene with a director, long before you get to set, it is important to ask them; what is the scene about? What is the director hoping to achieve in the story by including this scene. Usually, you can have them boil it down to a word; Apology, redemption, betrayal, etc. Lighting in narrative work is about telling the story with pictures, and we have to understand what fundamentally happens in the scene before we can place any light in the space. Everything we do with light must have a purpose, be deliberate, serve the story, and reveal something about the characters in the process