Original subtitles

The key light is usually the brightest and the most visible light on set, its purpose

is to highlight the form and dimension of on-screen subjects. without realizing it we

have already created one. so let's just promote it to the key light role and call it like that.

I'm rotating it in such way so it faces the camera and then extending it a little bit and

making it way larger. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna position it on the other side of the scene, so we

shoot in shadows and it will become clear why in just a moment. for now let's leave it there,

make it relatively large and then head over to the light settings menu and adjust its power.

now it's a little bit too weak to pretend to be the key light, so let's give it a boost

well, it makes sense to talk about brightnesses or light ratios when there's more than one light in

the scene and we will talk about that, but so far I'm just trying to make it sufficiently bright.

mm-hmm. now it packs a punch without going over the top in terms of brightness, it's

sufficiently bright to serve as our main light. then the next property that we're gonna adjust

is its size, which directly connects to softness. the rule sounds like that: the smaller the light

in proportion to the subject the harder and vice versa. the bigger the emission surface the softer.

given the bigger source area the transition between the light and the shadow becomes less

sharp and less pronounced and that is what we call soft. as usual why not throw in a visual comparison.

soft light means a gradual transition between light and shadow, hard light means razor sharp

shadows. but then it's all about the gradient between lit and shaded areas,

the gradient that depends on the size of the light source. it's really easy to see how the

gradient gets stretched on increasing the light size to the point of a super ambient and slightly

flat lighting and then on rolling the size back it collapses a little bit, I cannot emphasize enough how

important it is to establish a neural link between the light size and softness and this gradient.

okay what I usually like to do for moving the light source around is press

Dot and select 3D cursor as the Pivot Point, alternatively you can find it in in this menu,

by default it's set to active element, we just change it to 3D cursor and then shift and right

click on any kind of surface and with the lights are selected press R and Z to constrain the

rotation to the z-axis and it will pivot around your 3D cursor, isn't that great :) so now it's time

to talk about the direction of the light source, just after we have talked about the power and the

softness. the direction means *a lot* in lighting, for example now we have placed our light in a rather

frontal way and thus we have flattened the image quite a bit, more often than not we don't want it,

we don't want to flatten our stuff. by moving it off to the side we make sure that the light

is now splitting the object, so it got the much needed contrast between brightly lit and shadowy

sides that is already in the zone of sculpting shape with light compared to more frontal light.

so key light that comes in from the side is already more dynamic in how it creates the

shape and reveals the depth of the minerals and the stuff around it, it can be placed overhead

for the top light or moved to the side or maybe you can place it directly on the opposite side

in relationship to the camera so it's now technically a backlight even though it's a

key light, our main dominant light that still creates most of the form and definition in the

scene and actually with this particular light placement we now shoot in shadows.

we shoot in into shadow side and that is called upstage lighting or reverse key lighting and if

there is one little thing that we can do to make our scenes more cinematic right

away, is... uh shooting into shadows. as simple as drawing the line and placing the key light on

the opposite side from the camera, so now even though this scene lacks any kind of fill... uh... we

can appreciate the transition between light and shadow and all the shadows actually falling in

in the direction of the camera which makes it look three-dimensional and great and cinematic,

actually to prove this point in a fun way let's select the camera and the key light and pivot

it around our minerals and funny enough we can tell that by keeping the camera on the opposite

side of our key light we make sure that there is no flattening going on it, it becomes hilariously

hard to screw it up, right? :) it still feels pretty three-dimensional due to the key light position.

to recap the placement of the key light, it's actually super important to consider to what

extent does it actually help you to model the shape and dimension of your subject when it's

placed on the camera side, when it's, let's say, kind of frontal or does it make more sense from

the cinematic standpoint to highlight the shape and the object to actually push our key light to

the opposite side of the scene, so we shoot into the shadow side as it makes the light and shadow

play much more dynamic and nine times out of ten at least in my opinion the reverse key lighting

or the upstage lighting is much more cinematic in terms of revealing the form of the object indeed.

not to take away anything from the more frontal light projections, but undeniably they are a little

bit flat sometimes and it's good when you need such flatness for whatever purposes, but if your

goal as a 3D cinematographer as it happens is to enhance the depth and enhance the dimension, that

makes the reverse key lighting a no-brainer in my opinion. it works with the hard lights as well, it

doesn't really matter, the overall direction from which the light hits the object matters the most

here. the same principle would be the right word applies here, not the hard-coded rule and if it

was the rule it could be broken, but the principle. the fronty light has usually less dimension than

the side light or any other combination of the light hitting the object at an angle and of course

it's all relative to the camera position so if the camera switched sides the light should jump

to the other... other side of the scene as well to maintain the reverse key lighting. so that I

think could be a key takeaway, no pun intended, for choosing the direction of your main light source.