How to Light Cinematically with NO LIGHTING GEAR

Lighting. It's easily the most overlooked aspect of filmmaking. And whether that's because people don't understand how important it is, they think they need expensive lighting gear, or whatever the reason may be, lighting is ironically the number one thing that will transform everything about your videos. First off, I need to shine some truth on a lie you may have been telling yourself. The lie is, I don't have any lights. And that couldn't be further from the truth. Start walking around and identify any item you have access to that puts off light. From lamps and flashlights, to windows and computer screens, not to mention the sun, you have lights. And you don't need a lot of light either. Less light is almost always more cinematic. The key is being creative. We're prone to let the lack of perfect circumstances and resources prevent us from creating. This scene here is from a project I did a while back. The whole scene is lit from the headlights of this car and a couple of phone flashlights, one of which I'm actually holding right off screen. Now let's take a close look at this shot. I lit the whole scene with two lights. A fridge, acting as the key light, and a porch light outside the window to add some more depth to the scene. All I needed here was some creative framing and usage of the existing space and lights. And these lighting principles apply to literally any camera. I've seen footage shot on high-end cinema cameras. It looks horrible due to bad lighting. And I've also seen incredible footage shot on cameras worse than an iPhone because the lighting was good. And in case you were wondering, this fridge scene was shot on an iPhone. Shooting outside is probably the most difficult because you can't control the sun. What you can do, however, is plan ahead. The time of day and weather you're shooting in make a huge difference. If you didn't know, the best time to shoot is golden hour, which is the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset. And now while you can shoot any direction during golden hour, the best images are when you point the camera directly at the sun. Overcast days are great for filming because the clouds diffuse the hard light of the sun evenly, allowing you to shoot any direction. And early in the morning or at higher elevations will often get you fog, which will add depth to your image and generally just look epic. Also, weather like rain or snow, a time when most people stay inside is the time you need to get out and shoot, especially slow motion as the elements in the sky slow down the entire atmosphere, not just the subject. Moving inside now, day interiors can be fairly simple. The first thing you do is turn off ceiling lights and rely on window light. That provides a nice soft light source from the side instead of a hard source from the top. Also, putting lamps and showing light sources in your shot can add interest to the image. Now, I think the one thing that people often neglect when talking about weather and lighting is the storytelling. Because while golden hour looks nice, it may not always tell the story the best way. And while there's stereotypes that you don't have to follow, such as golden hour being romantic or rain being emotional, you do need everything to be consistent within each project. So there you go. You don't need to buy a bunch of lights. You can use what you already have and still put lighting principles to use to get cinematic images. Stop neglecting lighting because it's the number one thing that will transform everything about your videos.