Hello and welcome to this new episode of lighting breakdown. Today we continue our journey on Practical Lighting, and this time, we will see the approaches of the Great Cinematographer Bradford Young. He is known for his hit movies like Arrival, A Most Violent Year, Selma, and Solo: A Star Wars Story. Without any further ado, let’s get started right away.

Bradford Young: Practicals!  That’s the wonderful thing about the technology that we’re using. Whether it be filmed at 500 SI and very, very little grain with the speed of our lenses, you can actually now; you can shoot, you can get a lot with very little. You should watch the blocking of a scene. You see what things are happening and then you and the production designer and art director, Set Dec, let’s put a practical here and there because of the other scenes in the film that have the same sort of dinner, you accept the fact that if the person’s looking at the lamp, they’ll be front of them if I want to move around the person, at 360 degrees they’re completely backlit with it because we’ve seen where the source is coming from. I’ve been blessed because I’ve been able to shoot films in that way where filmmakers aren’t worried when I come around from another angle. They’re entirely in silhouette with a little bit of edge. They still feel like we’re delivering we’re giving the audience what they need in terms of communicating, whatever needs to be communicated at the moment, and gives it a lot of visual texture between film or without incredible digital cameras that are out now we can do that most seamless, we can do that without a lot of Lighting setups. You don’t have to move everything; the lights are there; you just need to turn stuff off. That’s the blessing of being able to use practicals. 

As soon as you show the audience where the light is coming from, as soon as you tell yourself where the light is coming from, then you can go, you can jump around and take all types of liberties, and the more you jump around in that environment, for me, the more beautiful because then you start to have a scene that’s got you tell a story through lighting texture—the use of light and Shadow.  Sometimes you know, that doesn’t always work out. Sometimes you don’t have enough, so you need to bring in other sources, for instance,… You have one lamp on set that looks this way. It’s got a shade on it, which is a little bit more oxidized than the shade over here, so it’s not pure white by the time we put a bulb in it, and we dim it down. It’s super warm. The shade adds another layer of warmth, and the first thing you say is can you find another shade? This color or can you art, can you art direct a shade to be this color?

How Do You Deal With Skin Tone?

In Selma, when we created our initial LUT with Tom Poole at Company 3, we found that cyan helped. Ruth Carter (Costume designer) came in and had quite a bit of cyan, aqua, and blue in the frame; she and Mark Friedberg (production designer), who have done this a million times before me, were well aware that when you’re dealing with these sorts of skin tones, you’re dealing with lighting value. You’ve got to enhance it with something in the frame that takes people’s eyes away from what can be perceived as underexposure or a lack of density. We found that cyan is a key color because it allows us to go deeper and more prosperous.

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New to film lighting? Or do you want to learn much more about lighting? Discover these books, written by great cinematographers, helped me a lot in learning and increasing my knowledge of the different types of lighting techniques and methods without going to a school film. Best Cinematography Books

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Sources: Cooke Optics YouTube Channel / ASC Magazine