lighting
ˈlʌɪtɪŋ/
noun
- equipment in a room, building, or street for producing light."fluorescent bulbs for street lighting"
Soft front light / hot backlight
A popular technique in film lighting is to use a soft (diffuse) light source from the front and a stronger, more directional light from the back, so that your subject has a hot edge. The soft frontal light is known as the fill light; the strong light at the back is known, unsurprisingly, as the backlight.
You can arrange the lights in such a way as to leave darkness between the area illuminated by the backlight and the area illuminated by the fill light, depending on how moody you want the shot to be. This tends to work very well, although even the moodiest films tend to avoid leaving dark shadows on the faces of female talent. The film still shown above is from “Schindler’s List” and is a good example of this technique, but be warned that Janusz Kaminski is an extraordinary cinematographer!
The reason for which lights are necessary in filmmaking is that film, and to an even greater extent video, does not respond to light the same way our eyes do. Specifically, film and video see things in a much more contrasty way.In other words, they cannot cope with the lighting contrast of real life: if you shoot a scene without artificial lights, either the shadows will go completely black or the highlights will go completely white. All of this means that if you want a scene to look natural, ironically the only way to do that is to have enough light to make film see the scene the way our eyes see the scene.
