the cheat code for cinematic lighting

[Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] One of the easiest and simplest ways that you can make your shots look better is to use fog in your image. Just by using fog, you can turn your images from looking like this into this. So, if you've never heard of it, what is fog and how do we actually use it effectively? The number one reason filmmakers use fog is to introduce depth and add volume to their lighting. When you're using a camera and lens, you're flattening out your 3D world into a 2D image. That's why cinematographers like to use things like foreground elements, background elements, lighting, all that kind of stuff in order to shape a 2D image to look more like a 3D world. And fog is a thicker substance than water vapor. Water vapor is just water and it just kind of dissipates after you release it. This gives you the ability to see the shape of your light. It adds another dimension to your shot and it also kind of gives character to your lighting. Now, fog isn't really something that I've used a whole ton of in the past. For my projects, when I'm shooting commercials and live events, it doesn't really call for fog, so I never really get the chance to play around with it, but it is very exciting when you do get the chance to mess around with fog. Now, when I'm going into a project and I know that I'm going to be using fog, I'm going to give myself some prep time in order to get the fog looking right. You can't just release it and then immediately expect to start shooting with it. It's not going to look good at all. Fog needs a lot of time to settle in before it looks its best. Now, I'm using the Cobalt CF5 fog machine. Here's what happens when you immediately start shooting before you let it settle. You'll notice that the particles are moving all around in the shot, and it looks like my computer is on fire. It's like smoke coming out of it or something. Definitely not what I'm trying to go for. And then in the next shot, this is what it looks like after you wait 10 to 15 minutes for the fog to really settle down. And you can tell it's way less distracting, but you can still see the shape of the light that's coming in through the window right behind me. Now, once I release the fog from the CF5, I like to manually start fanning it with like a newspaper or some magazine or something like that. Anything that can make the fog disperse and disappear and dissipate into the air a lot faster. The CF5 actually does come with a fan unit attached to the front of it magnetically, which is really cool. You can set the fan speed to three different levels. I usually put it on the highest, the strongest level. Combining that little fan and me manually fanning it out, it makes the fog even out a lot faster. Now, I probably should have started with this first, but it's important to note that you don't want any air flow. You don't want AC on. You don't want doors open, windows open. You want everything closed and none of the air inside the room that you're working in to be moving around. Cuz once you start having air move around, it takes that fog and it just like shoves it right out the window or shoves it right out the door or sucks it right back into the ventilation if the AC is on. On a recent shoot at a restaurant, AC was on and we found out really, really quickly that, you know, fog doesn't like AC. We tried to release fog into the whole room and within a few seconds, it was just gone. It was like you didn't, it did not stay in the air for long at all. So, make sure you turn everything off. No air flow at all. Now, it's also important to not use too much fog and not overdo it, or else you'll lose a lot of contrast, a lot of saturation, and it'll make your image look really gloomy and hazy, which could be a look that you're trying to go after. But definitely for me, in this particular shot right here, this was definitely not what I was going for. It's easier to add fog than to get rid of it. So, use a little bit at first, fan it out, see how you like it, if it's not enough, then add more to it. The CF5 has a really cool interval release feature that allows you to add a certain amount of fog after a certain amount of time. Kind of like a time-lapse feature. And I actually found this to be really, really useful. It helps me dial in exactly how much fog I want. So, what I'll do is I'll continually release fog for like a minute or so and then just to see how it looks, fan it out, and then the little CF5 will just release 5 seconds of fog and then wait 40 seconds and then release 5 seconds of fog. And it'll do that like 40 times over again. So that way I'm not all of a sudden adding so much fog into the atmosphere and I'm letting it go 5 seconds at a time. So always remember with fog, start small and then go big gradually. The best way that I found to really maximize that wow factor when I'm shooting with fog is to use hard directional light. That's backlighting the fog at an angle. That means you want to be using fog when you have something to break up the light. Ideally, you want to be shooting indoors, maybe with light coming in through a window or using your own light and attaching maybe like a spotlight mount to it so that you can actually shape the beam of that light. Or if you're outdoors, you might want to be shooting with trees, lots of trees, breaking up the sunlight with leaves and stuff like that. But with this little CF5 fog machine, you're probably not going to be taking this outdoors anytime soon. It's very small, so you're not going to be outputting a whole ton of fog. Don't use it in broad bare daylight. you're never going to see any like light beams or any shape to the light because the light is just literally everywhere when I'm shooting with soft light and trying to use fog with it. What I found that is you will most likely get the highlights to bloom more than getting shape on the light, which isn't really what I was going after in my shots. You can see these two examples right here where I am being backlit and I'm shooting directly into the window with sunlight coming in. The sunlight, however, is behind some clouds. It was a cloudyish day. It was intermittent clouds. So just at that moment when I was shooting, the sun was right behind clouds and uh it created this really soft light. It looks really nice. And because the light was very directionless, the fog didn't help at all. It just made everything more directionless. Versus when I was actually using my own light, the Cobalt CL330, and attaching it with the God Doc Spotlight mount, I was able to get that fog to really bring out that shape from the light. And because you could see that beam of light really clearly, it just helped draw your eyes towards whatever the subject was. In this case, it was me as I was working. And my camera placement was also really important. Like I said, I don't want the camera to be directly in front of the light, shooting into the light. That way, you don't really get to see the shape of the light. I like having the light backlighting the fog at an angle so that you can actually see the outline of that shape of the light. All right, cool. This was a very fun little experiment. The CF5 is a really cool little portable fog machine. You would really ideally just use it for something like a home office space like a 10 x 12 or 10 x10 office space like the one I have. Anything bigger than this, like even if I tried to do it in my living room, which is kind of a bigger space, it probably won't work the best. It probably will take a lot of time for the fog to fill up the entire space. And then for the fog to be at its most optimal level, it's going to take a lot of time for the fog to just settle in. So, I would ideally want to use something bigger for a fog machine or you would just use it in a smaller environment. And as with most fog machines, they're going to be loud. They're going to have a fan. They're going to have some sort of like mechanism or motor to spit out the fog. And so, that's going to be that's going to be loud. So, you're not going to be able to have any dialogue as the thing is going. Otherwise, overall, I had a really fun time messing around with fog. This is one of the rare few times that I get to actually play around with something like this. But that's it for this quick little video of me relearning how to use Fog. Let me know if you have any questions or comments down below. That's it. My name is Alex Chong and I'll see you later. Bye.