Hello, hard video, all the stuff I'm back! Today for you guys, I'm going to be giving you my thoughts on how to light, expose and grade a moody, low-key scene and show you how to go from this to this. This is kind of a subjective topic because there isn't technically a wrong way of doing things, but hopefully you'll find some interesting tidbits in this video and yeah, sit back and enjoy the ride. But I would encourage you to comment down below with your experiences because you know I love that we can collaborate and help each other to learn. Recently I've seen some amazing examples of low-key in TV shows such as The Expans, Altered Carbon and in particular American Gods, which just looks stunning and like nothing else I've ever seen. Watching American Gods feels like a lighting masterclass. The way they've used powerful lighting to create silhouettes around the talent and the way they've used catch lights for the talent's eyes to really make them piercing is just inspiring. I was really interested to read that this series was actually filmed on black magic cameras where I thought it would be Array or Red. Anyway, needless to say, highly recommended, definitely, definitely watch it. So I'll be taking inspiration from all of those shows in this video, in particular American Gods. What I'm looking for is that extreme contrast, super crisp and sharp look and we're going to use highlights to our advantage. So let's get on with it. This is what I started with just the overhead lights on in the room. To begin with, I decided to use a linear profile, in this case a cine one, instead of a log profile and I'll get to that later. The quality of light is pretty horrible and quite unflattering so let's turn all the lights off and get lighting our subject. The first thing I did was add a hair light and I used an aperture LS Mini 20D. I also did some DIY diffusion on it by just taping some baking paper across the front of it. I made sure the baking paper was white instead of unbleached because I wanted to keep the light nice and cool looking. I then added what is effectively my key light and in this case it's on the far side of the face. This really helps to accentuate the contrast in our scene and really makes our subject silhouette pop. At this stage you may want to add a fill light of some sort on the near side of her face. I tried using a variety of lights and they were all way too bright. I tried using the bounce side of a reflector too bright. In the end, unbelievably I ended up using a small sheet of paper just off scene. In the end I couldn't resist the extreme contrast so I went with the one without the bounce light. This is a really simple two light setup with one light behind and to the left and one behind to the right. As I mentioned for the hair light I'm using an aperture LS Mini 20D and for our main key light on the left I'm using the aperture C300 and of course I'm pairing it with aperture's light dome for really nice diffusion. My instinct when setting the focus point was to go for the near side eye because well that's just the instinct and that's what we tend to always do. However in this case that doesn't make sense because there's so much contrast you're not even going to see the focus point. It's a much better bet going for the off side eye because that's where our light is and you'll notice that this is very much the fashion in many TV programmes these days. I then switched over to a log profile because I thought I could better achieve what I was looking for and looking at the histogram this just shows you how useless they are when exposing this kind of scene. Most of our image is below 25% and we can see any kind of highlight information is just creeping its way up. A waveform gives us way more useful information. In this case we can see that the highlight areas of her face on the left side are up at 75% and the shadow areas are sat at around 30% which is going to be perfect. All of that information we saw below 25% in the histogram we can see here is actually the background and that is exactly what we want it. Right we've got all our shots now let's move things into editing so we can grey things. I'm going to use Final Cut and I'm only going to use the stock plugins so in theory you could do the same thing you could mimic exactly what I do in any editing programme. Let's do it. The first thing I'm going to do is to drop the exposure slightly and this is great when I have to do this in log because it means I've overexposed for my scene slightly and it means that things are going to look slightly cleaner. I'm just using the colour wheels function which obviously resolve has and Premiere Pro has so that's no problem. It's starting to look good but I really want things to be super contrasty and I'm still seeing lots of information in the shadows so let's add some curves. I really like spending a bit of time with the curves, working them just seeing what detail I can bring out and really perfecting that image. I'm going to be in a shot like this and I'm going to be bringing the shadows down quite a bit but take note I've been quite delicate with the highlights. I want them to be really prominent but I really don't want to lose detail and especially not clip any highlights. Lastly I'm going to add a lot because I've got one in mind and I know that log loves lots. For this scene I'm going to use the Triune Films Drive LUT because the palette of colours is beautiful. Personally I really don't like using luts all the way at 100% I like to dial it back to the 50% 75% wherever it looks best. And there we have our transformed log image. Personally I love it. If you're wondering what looks so sharp it's because I'm using the Sigma 50mm art. I've got a full opinion video coming for that lens so definitely hit subscribe to catch that when it comes. If you want to add some fill light on the shadow area of her face you can just use something like colour correct shape mask from CoreMelt. It's really simple to use and obviously you can track the talents face which makes things really easy if your talent is moving in your scene. And that's it for now as usual I loved making this for you guys. It's always fun and hopefully found it helpful interesting and informative. Until next time let's help each other out and she better videos. It's me and next time.