The Gaffer's Guide: Lighting With No Budget...

By Jessica Creech 

I’ve been lighting sets of all shapes and sizes for nearly ten years now, so it probably won’t surprise you to know that I believe the way a filmmaker lights his or her productions is extremely important. In fact, lighting often tells as much of your story as the dialogue does. And it dramatically effects what your audience “hears” when they view your product. The manner in which you light the set and actors shapes the way the audience receives your message. It sets the mood of the scene, reinforces the tone of the environment and, at its most basic level, either illuminates or obscures the most critical nuances of your production. Pretty important stuff, right? 

I know that many of you are more than a little intimidated by the prospect of lighting your film on a budget that is already stretched WAY too thin. First, let me reassure you that you don’t need the entire ARRI, Mole Richardson, etc. product line to effectively reinforce your story with lighting. What you really need is a little know-how and the confidence to explore unfamiliar terrain. So kick back, relax and let me be your tour guide as we explore the art of guerilla lighting. I’ll be sharing with you some of the fundamentals of lighting, beginning with the basics and moving to more advanced concepts. This article is going to deal mainly with techniques you can employ with little more than a trip to your local hardware store. 

Only a month or so ago, I was working on an intense three day shoot with the shoestring budget to end all shoestring budgets! I was on board as the Gaffer (head lighting technician) on a volunteer basis helping a local filmmaker turn his dream into a reality. Fortunately, the director had a couple of tools to use, but by and large, I had to start with absolutely nothing and assemble an adequate lighting arsenal for about $200. Impossible? Not at all! Here’s how I did it.

Keep track of the sun's position, intensity and color temperature when shooting outdoors.  Often blocking or bouncing the light with PhotoFlex will allow you to harness the SOLAR POWER efficiently.

The first thing to determine, on any shoot, is all the locations that you will be shooting at. Take a notebook with you and write down the locations, time of day the scene will be shot and any other observations you make about the setting. This is especially important when you are shooting outdoors, since controlling the environment with ultra-limited resources is next to impossible. That doesn’t mean you can’t use your ingenuity to work around many issues though. The Director of Photography (DP) will be relying on you to help him or her think ahead to identify difficulties you may encounter, so speak up if you notice obvious impediments that will affect how and where the scene is ultimately shot. For instance, the sun’s location and intensity of the rays will change over the course of the day. So if you set up your equipment and stay in the same spot all day, you’ll find there is a huge difference in the lighting you’ll encounter when shooting at 12 noon versus 4 p.m. You must compensate for elements like this one that you have no control over. It is much less frustrating and time consuming to consider these in the pre-production stage than in the middle of a shoot day. 

During our time shooting outdoors, I used several different methods to use the natural light to our advantage. Our biggest ally was a shelter without walls we found at a local park. The roof kept the sun from flooding the shot and making the image too hot (bright), but allowed plenty of light to expose the subject indirectly. We also used a piece of equipment called a PhotoFlex reflector to bounce light up onto the subject from underneath. This was very helpful in combating those dark shadows that bright lights create on uneven surfaces such as faces. It is the equivalent of a small fill light without any cords or power source required. A PhotoFlex also weighs only about a pound and is “flex”-ible. So a gaffer can bend and twist it in a variety of ways to position the light at odd or difficult angles. Most of these reflectors have both a shiny and matte side, so you can adjust the light you create based on your needs. One final advantage to having this tool is that you can also flag (block) light when you need to. This is helpful for either harnessing light’s intensity to illuminate your subject or block light from hitting your subject altogether. Not only is it versatile in terms of use, but it is collapsible to 1/3 its full size for easy storage. You can purchase a 42” PhotoFlex reflector online for around $50!! Trust me when I say you owe it to yourself to invest in one or two of these. This is a piece of equipment that will be helpful to you in any and every lighting situation, so invest in one!

When dealing with ultra-low budget setups like this clamp lamp with a 500 W 3200K flood lamp and aluminum foil "BARN DOORS", it's often difficult to diffuse them properly if they are too bright.  Bouncing them off the ceiling can solve this problem, especially if it's a white ceiling.

Another difficult lighting situation we encountered was creating daylight at night. Try as we did, we were unable to get all of our shots in while we had natural light to work with. So I had to get my creative juices flowing! If we had been shooting outdoors, we’d just have been out of luck and had to reschedule the scene for another day. Fortunately we were working indoors and had more options. The scene was one of a family sitting around their table having lunch in the afternoon. Again the time of day we wanted to mimic was important to consider because OUTDOOR LIGHTING (like that pouring through a window in the afternoon) has a decidedly bluish tint to it. So we had to use fluorescent bulbs to achieve the appropriate color.  Using incandescent bulbs, which produce an orangish tint, would clearly expose our situation. We were able to light this scene with two aluminum scoop lights ($10 a piece) from Wal-Mart with 500 watt 3200 Kelvin LG&E bulbs ($4 a piece online). We bounced both lights off the ceiling, using one as a key light for broad illumination and the other as a backlight to separate the actors from the background.

5500 K daylight bulbs can provide the illusion of sunlight streaming through WINDOWS..

Our final trick was to set up two lights outside the house on the back deck and shine them through partially opened blinds for an afternoon look. The bulbs that worked well for me were 55 watt FL55 spiral fluorescent lamps with a color temperature of 5500 DEGREES Kelvin/daylight balanced. Don’t be confused by the lower wattage notation. These lamps are powerful! I found these online for $50 a piece.

Screen capture from raw footage recorded for Collide.  (Captured with Panasonic DVX100B.)

The third scenario that needed a creative solution was convincingly lighting a scene in which our lead actor was in his car very late at night. Nighttime scenes are particularly tricky because the subject must be exposed adequately, but not with so much light that it looks like you're trying. The key to creating stellar lighting is to make the set look as though you're not trying at all….particularly if you're not aiming for dramatic flare.

Lighting at night in cars is quite difficult, but can be accomplished with some creativity and know-how.  (Screen capture from raw footage recorded for Collide.  Captured with Panasonic DVX100B.)

For this shot, we made use of some items found on location. After determining the angle that the DP wanted to shoot from, (which will influence many of your decisions) I decided that a lot of external lighting was going to look very unnatural and just plain bad. My DP wanted to shoot through the front windshield, so lighting from the side or front was risky in terms of reflections off the car and glass. The most convincing option was to find some sort of overhead light source.

After scouting the location for a few minutes, I was able to find a streetlamp in a vacant parking lot. One of our crew members was nice enough to loan us his car with a sunroof, so we opened that up and let the light stream in. Of course, we had to find a way to counteract those ultra dark shadows on the actors face. So I chose to use one small fluorescent STICK LIGHT (the kind used in aquariums) with 60 watts of power and positioned it in front of the car's instrument panel. It was the perfect size to rest on the steering column and gave some great fill light for the scene. The light was located a bit lower than the actor's face, so its indirect nature softened up the existing shadows instead of creating more of them. This set-up worked for most of the shots in the scene.

The Photo-Flex isn't just for bouncing daylight.  In Collide, we found that it worked even better at reflecting powerful artificial lights, like street lights.

However, for shots from the side of the car, we needed a bit of additional illumination. Again, I used my PhotoFlex reflector to bounce some of the ambient light from the overhead unit onto the side of the actor. I had to assume a pretty awkward body position for a few minutes, but the tactic worked extremely WELL. For that entire scene, the only equipment I used was one foot-long, 60 watt stick light and a reflector. The ambient light provided the rest. Always take advantage of anything in the environment that will be helpful and get creative. Try some new ideas and they just might work.

Our final challenging lighting scenario called for very soft, dim light during a death scene. Additionally, we were in an extremely small room with white walls. In case you are unaware, white walls make controlling the light very difficult because there is no color to absorb any of the beam. Light continues to bounce around the room constantly, making a subtle set up a real HEADACHE. Here's the solution I came up with

Creative use of practical lights can achieve enough illumination if WELL thought through.

First, I turned out all the lights in the room. We shot this scene at night, which is what the script called for. But if we were doing it in the daytime, I'd have put two layers of black plastic garbage bags over the windows to totally block the external light. Next, I used a tall DESK LAMP with a 50 watt bulb and positioned it on the edge of the bedside table next to the body. I chose to leave the lamp shade on to direct the light downward toward the body's face. (That accomplished somewhat the same thing that barn doors on a professional light would have done.) However, leaving the shade on also prevented less light from spilling into the scene, so depending on your needs, you may have to use a higher watt bulb. Finally, I used the PhotoFlex once more to block the light escaping on the other side of the lamp. It reflected that ambient light back toward the body without having to set up more equipment. For our purposes, it was an effective solution.

Screen capture from raw footage recorded for Collide.  (Captured with Panasonic DVX100B.)

In the end, we were able to produce a high quality product in much less than ideal circumstances. As I hope you've seen from my experience, you don't have to have expensive "toys" to do a good JOB lighting your production. Actually, lighting without them will force you to learn much more because you will have to develop a mindset of thinking about light and what it looks like when it's not manipulated. The more you become an observer of light in general, the more you will learn what is natural and appropriate and will be able to create it on set. It will become instinctual so that the audience will be fooled, no matter what you did…..or didn’t do…. to accomplish your goal.

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