Lighting question for shot of subject at PC

[Andre Klonowski]

Hi all🙂

I am just starting on my film making journey and I have a question about a shot and maybe someone here can give me some pointers.

In the shot I have in mind the subject is sitting at a PC in the dark and the camera is facing the subjects face and is standing in front of the desk. The subject is working at the PC which should be indicated by the light emitting from the displays changing. The rest of the room should be dark.

So my problem is that if I try to just use the light of the displays to light my subject it seems like the lightsource is to weak and it is way too dark but if I try to use exterior light then it lights up the whole scene and I do not get mood that I would like to.

Any ideas how I can improve my lighting situation ? Or maybe I am looking at this problem in a wrong way.

Any help would be appreciated.

Greets

Andre

[David Mullen ASC]

First thing, you can try to get a faster camera (and or faster lens) and/or make the screen image as bright as possible.

Beyond that, you'd have to create a thin, flat soft light that fits in front of the real screen but is hidden from camera, something made up of Lite Ribbon LEDs or something like that, diffused. You could do some basic dimmer cues to create flicker and changes in intensity. Depending on the size of the screen, there may be some flat LED panels on the market already that will fit (there might even be some that can be pixel-mapped with a video feed, I don't know.)

Once you get tight enough that you don't see both sides of the foreground screen, you can use a bigger LED that sticks out on the off-camera side. Or maybe a bigger LED HDR TV screen that can act as a light.

[Andre Klonowski]

Hey,

thx 🙂

I will try the solution with the leds in front of the screen

[Nicolas POISSON]

I would also use a flat LED panel on the display. Since the source will be right in front of the face, you do not even need a wide emitting surface. A small battery-powered panel does the trick. I would set it to a higher color temp than the camera to get a cold white.

I would not bother changing the light: it is more a "TV" effect. A computer display is usually steady, unless the actor is supposed to be watching a movie.

Edited January 13 by Nicolas POISSON

[Albion Hockney]

keep in mind. lighting is simple.

if your background becomes too bright when you turn a light on, that's because the light is hitting the background too brightly.

one method we use in that situation is to "flag" the light off the background with black fabric

[Jeff Bernstein]

Shooting a homemade movie on video for a film contest in the mid-80s, young Scrooby created an effect similar to what you're after by pointing a Super-8 projector at the face of the actor and letting film wind through its workings, in the process sending colourful and changeable imagery on the face of the actor.