How To Light A Candle Lit Scene | Cinematic Lighting

Hello and good day and welcome back to the classroom. If you have not been here yet, well, my name is Brady. If you have been here, welcome back. You know the drill. You should probably hit that subscribe button. But I honestly am so excited about what we've got going on here today. So I am honestly wasting zero time getting into it. Pretty much in a nutshell, Sarah asked me again to beat her in Scrabble, as I always do. So I thought why not set out to make a beautiful candlelit scene because I wanted to teach how to light a candlelit scene because it's so difficult to light for a source that is so natural and ambient. So without further ado, I think it should definitely be appropriate for things to be candlelit. And let's dive in. Now let's talk about camera setup. For this scene, I had my Sigma 18-35 on top of my Blackmagic Pocket 4K. And with that, I used my Tiffin Black ProMist 1.4 filter because I really wanted to bloom the highlights right around the candle and put a nice glow around all of the candles just to add to this candlelit mood. And then before we add in any lights here, let's talk about just the characteristics of candlelight so we can really replicate it as best as we can. So candlelight, it's natural, it's ambient. It's not gonna spill throughout the whole room. It's really gonna stay isolated in this one area. So there's that. And then also, naturally, candlelight typically flickers quite a bit, at least with any kind of movement or breeze. So the two key points that we really wanna cover here to nail down this candlelit look is that we want it dim and not to spill throughout the walls. And we really wanna control our light to an isolated location, but also we kinda wanna replicate that flickering pattern in a way that looks natural and not artificial. Now, the light of choice that I picked for our candle source was Aputure's Nova P300C, otherwise known as an absolute workhorse name provided by myself because it's a workhorse, but that's not the only reason why I picked this light in particular. I picked it because panel lights are already softer than single-source lights. They've got a larger spread or a larger source, sorry, of light, so it's gonna be softer and we want soft candlelight. So I chose it for that reason, but also a lot of new LED lights will have this, but Aputure has a candle mode or a fire effect mode, similar to what's going on here behind me. So it makes it a lot easier when I've got such a small crew, being myself and Sarah lighting this scene. So it'll flicker for you and you don't have to play around with that. But if you don't have a light with an effect like this, you can still definitely nail down this look. For the placement of this Nova, I still wanted it coming from a little bit of the front because the candles are mostly sitting right around the front side of us. So I wanted to keep that continuity, but I still kept the light coming enough to the side where I'm still getting some contrast across our face, across the board, across everything going on in the scene, because if it was all front lit, it would look very washed out and flat. You wouldn't get the contrast that we're going for. And then in this narrow room that I was working with, I found a perfect spot actually in the cutout of this desk. And I just placed the Nova on the floor there, shooting into the room from there. And that actually worked in my favor because the desk kind of blocked out any spilling of light on the walls and in the rest of the room. But if you don't have a perfect desk for this, you can use flags just to kind of block in that light so it's not spilling anywhere else. And then even though this panel is very soft by itself, I wanted to add in a little bit more diffusion just to cut out that harshness once more. So I put just some diffusion right in front of that cutout in the desk and that softened things up significantly, but also I didn't want it to be sourcy on the floor since the Nova was on the floor, the brightest point is gonna be kind of raking across that carpet. So just to avoid that hot spot on the floor and on the carpet, I took a little bit more diffusion, just doubled up like white bed sheet, and I clamped it to the bottom half of that diffusion just so as it's coming down on the bottom side of things, it's really cutting out and it's not gonna be as strong raking across the carpet, keeping the focus still on us and looking like it's really coming from the candles. And one thing you really wanna remember when lighting your candlelit scene is that less is more. Candles are very soft, they're very ambient, you don't wanna overpower the scene with this light because then it'll look fake. And you can kind of gauge that by making sure that the light source hitting your actual subject isn't brighter than the flames themselves because if the light is coming from just the flame, it's not gonna be brighter by the time it gets to you. So make sure you're not overpowering with this light. Now to the important part of getting that natural candle flicker that we are going for. Like I said before, aperture does make it really, really easy to go into the menu, change the effect, customize it exactly how you need to, bam, you're ready to go. But say your light doesn't have that ability, I would say the one thing at the very least that is most important is having a light source that is warm or bi-color. So that way you can match up the color temperature of your light to those of the candles so everything matches and looks natural. But say you've got that, but you don't have the ability to have effects on your light. Well, one thing that you can do is either just simply if you've got another body on set, you can just adjust it. You know, dial in the exposure or the output of the light a little bit up, a little bit down, and just play around with it at random because candles are random. Or another thing that you could do is waive some diffusion or something like paper, anything that might be kind of translucent in front of the light. So that way it's not completely cutting out the output and it's like on, off, on, off. It's more of like a random, like little bit of exposure, a little bit less, a little bit more. You know, it's back and forth like a candle would be bouncing around. So with this one light in place, you've got a fantastic candlelit scene. Especially if you're working with limited lights, you could walk away from it and be very happy with it because it looks great. But then looking at it, I did notice that it is sitting pretty heavily over on the warm side of the spectrum. So I wanted to, you know, balance that out, add in some color contrast, and also add in some depth and coolness to the scene by bringing some lights outside in my next step. The next light that I added was Aputure's 300X, which is a bicolor fixture. And I brought that outside, right outside the window with a lantern on it. And the purpose of this light was to just brighten up the curtains a little bit, put a dim glow on the curtains and also the window frame. And using the lantern did a great job of softening the light. So it's not a hard light coming in, splashing on my shoulders, everything else, spilling a bunch of cool light into the scene. We wanna keep that ambience in there, but just enough to add a glow to the curtains and to the window. And when I tell you it was freezing cold, I mean, it was freezing cold. I will say it's absolutely freezing out here. So you guys better like this video. So dress accordingly, my friends, because I did not. But luckily I only had to go outside once or twice because Sidus Link saved the day. And I could control all the lights from the comfort of my candle lit home. But with that 300X in place, I started to ask myself, well, if there's a light source like the moon that's out there, that's shining a nice ambient light on the curtains and on the window, why can't I see anything else that's outdoors? So I wanted to add in one more light that's shining on the trees that you can see through the window. And that really adds a lot more sense of depth. So now it's not just us and the floor and the black window. Now you've got us, the floor, out the window, into the trees, and there's a dimly lit night scene now that we've developed. And the light that I chose for this is Aputure's 120D Mark II. And I had that with a Fresnel two times just shining from a distance onto those trees. Now let's wrap back around to the white balance like I had mentioned. This 120D is stuck at 5,600 Kelvin. It's a daylight light source. So I matched up my 300X to be the same thing right at 5,600. Now where white balance really comes into play is here. And since the candle light sits right around 2,000 Kelvin, it's very warm, and I knew that those other lights were 5,600 Kelvin, I knew that I needed to find somewhere in between to the point where those lights still stay warm, but also our cool lights outdoors still have that cool bluish moonlit feeling that we're going for. So to do that, I decided right around 3,200 Kelvin, and that way it still gave the candles some cushion to be really warm and give off that warm feel. But if I had boosted the white balance up to 5,000 or 5,600 to match those outdoor lights, then everything would be incredibly warm and not at all the look that we're going for. But contrasting that, if I had brought it down to 2,000 Kelvin, then the candles wouldn't even be warm at all. Everything would be super cool, and the candles wouldn't give off that warm feeling that we know that candles do. So 3,200 was that safe place right in between. So let's go ahead and take a look at all of the lights as we added them to see how it really put together the look that we wanted. I do hope that this candlelit scene really does encourage you to go out there and make your own candlelit scene or fire scene or something similar, because this excited me a lot. I had a blast doing it. It was a really fun time. But that is all that I have for you guys today. So until next time, please stay warm, cozy, and candlelit, and I will see you, well, next week. Class is dismissed.