Careers in Television and Video: Lighting Fundamentals and Principles, Part 1

One of the most common entry-level employment opportunities in the television, film and video industry is working with lighting. If you start here, you are under the direction of a person with an often, misunderstood job title. In Europe, they use a title that reveals their responsibility more clearly, a Director of Lighting. In American film, the person who creates the lighting scheme is a Director of Photography (DP). The DP creates the mood, ambiance and texture of what you see on screen, using lights and a variety of techniques. They know every light and how to manipulate each one to its fullest potential. On smaller productions, they may even operate the camera. DP's design the lighting scheme, but gaffers are the ones that set it all up.

Sometimes grips (labor crew) may help, but gaffers position and adjust (pinning) the lights according to the DP's direction. There is a head gaffer, best boy (assistant) and gaffing crew. Much of the actual work is demanding, physical and laborious, but the experience can be helpful in gaining more secure employment with local A/V crews and companies that hire out for special events like conventions, concerts, sporting events and other occasions. It may even be the reverse, starting with A/V crews and moving on to television and film crews. As I always say about the entertainment industry, there are many opportunities to cross back and forth, be it film, television or video. There is a wide variety of ways to do things.

It is the same with lighting. There are fundamentals in lighting, but it is up to the DP to use them creatively for setting a mood. There is a multitude of lights available for video, with a wide variety of purposes. We will only discuss the basic and most common ones you will work with, when beginning a career in this field. Please keep in mind that I am not a DP. Lighting is a skill and art form in itself, requiring a certain amount of study. In film, this knowledge and experience is critical, in television and video, yes and no. With film, you are setting the lights according to film media, film speed, and camera settings. It is a technical and mathematical process involving light meters and calculations. They use video systems for monitoring, and digital film is becoming more common, but filming a scene is a one-time chemical process, requiring exact calculations in lighting to produce the desired effect -before- rolling the camera. Once captured on film, you cannot go back and fix it. Lighting for video involves similar effort, but there are scopes to monitor the signal with, and what you see is most often what you record. Even so, lighting equipment and techniques are similar in both film and television.

This has been covered before, but pro video cameras have filters set exactly for 32K and 56K lighting. The 'K' stands for Kelvin. Kelvin means the color temperature of a light. Any light measures in Kelvin. For example, television and video lights are 3200 Kelvin (32K). Depending on the time of day, the sun is 5600 Kelvin (56K). When performing a white and black balance with the correct filter, you are telling the camera what white and black is, under the condition of lighting you are using, so that the camera reproduces the correct colors. There are basic differences between lights you use at home, and lights used for television and video. All lights have a color. They do not rate household lights by Kelvin, but your normal soon-to-be-obsolete light bulb is incandescent (filament-type). You may not notice it, but these give off a yellowish light. Standard florescent tubes give off a greenish light.

All television lights are 32K, and produce the same color. It does not matter if they are 500 watts or a thousand. Wattage affects brightness, and technically has no effect on color temperature, unless you dim the lights. We usually do not usually dim lights because it affects wattage, and will affect color temperature slightly. I know this sounds a little contradicting, so I will explain. Lamps (light bulbs) for television and video are made of quartz glass. Quartz holds up better to the high temperatures. Each lamp's color temperature (Kelvin) is set at the factory, according to the wattage it will be performing. Television lights normally come in increments of 500, 650, 750, 1000, 1,500 and 2,000 watts. With today's digital cameras, 500 or 650 watts are all you usually need. In television and video, instead of dimming a light and affecting Kelvin, and affecting how the camera's filter captures it, you normally use a lower wattage light, but there are other ways to decrease a light's intensity.

White is a combination of all colors. White has red, green, blue, yellow and every color you can think of. For example, when you see a rainbow you are seeing the raindrops act as prisms, breaking the sunlight into the colors that make it up. Another way at looking at it is by opening up your favorite paint program. In the color table are three colors to adjust with, red green and blue. These are the primary colors. Combining these colors, you can adjust them to create any color you wish. By setting them all to 100%, you have white, and by setting them all to 0%, you have black. In film and photography, RGB also has opposite colors, yellow cyan and magenta, similar to color printer ink cartridges. This is the circle of colors. Black is absence of color (having no color). Why is this important? Knowing this helps a DP manipulate the lights. Like a painter painting a scene, light intensity, color and shades influence the scene's mood. Even if you only want to make web videos, and cameras have many automatic functions, it is helpful to understand how you can influence these auto functions, because they do not often produce perfect results when left to their own devices.

Cameras capture light reflected back to the camera. Reflected back is a variety of combined elements like color brightness, that influence how the camera behaves and captures the image. Video measures in video level (brightness/white), pedestal (black), chroma (color saturation) and hue (color tint). This is relevant if you want a career in television because it is the standard used by camera operators, directors, editors, on air broadcasters and other positions. They use waveform monitors to measure video level, and a vector scope to measures chroma. You do not make adjustments with these devices. You make adjustments with other equipment components. Waveform monitors and vector scopes are only for monitoring the video signal at standardized settings. This is so every video scene has the same brightness, chroma and hue. It would look funny if each scene had different settings. Using these monitoring devices is beyond the scope (no pun intended) of this article, and may seem irrelevant for casual video enthusiasts.

The important thing to remember from all of this is that light is not only brightness reflected back to the camera, but color also influences the brightness. It is the reason why professional cameras have black and white viewfinders (plus its cheaper). Color can sometimes fool us. Stripping the chroma away in a viewfinder gives a truer picture of how much contrast is in the image, and if any lighting adjustments need to be made. If grayscale contrast is correct and acceptable, color (white/black balance) is only icing on the cake. Cameras can see only what you create, and what you tell them to see. They do not see things like human eyes do. In most cases, we manipulate lights to simulate what looks natural to our eyes, because a camera does not see it the same way. In our next segment in lighting, we will discuss a few common television lights used in this field. We will also explore using lights in normal situations, and using them creatively.