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  • Become a camcorder pro: A 10-step guide to making your footage shine

Become a camcorder pro: A 10-step guide to making your footage shine

By Chris Stevens, CNET.co.uk on 07 July 2006

Step 3: Use a reflector
Lighting is arguably the most important aesthetic of filmmaking. Lighting creates atmosphere, emphasises character and, at the most basic level, determines the exposure -- and therefore the legibility -- of the frame. Professional lighting rigs are expensive, power-hungry and potentially dangerous. Here we'll explain how to simulate a three-point Hollywood lighting system using just one light source and a reflector.

Video demands a great deal of light to be thrown at it for a good exposure. Just one studio light can set you back several hundred dollars. Luckily there is a light source that's free and substantially more powerful than most studio lights. It's called the sun.

The problem with shooting in sunlight is that, as with any strong single-source light, it often results in a high contrast across your actor's faces -- one side of the face is well lit, but the side facing away from the sun has a dark shadow. This is typically very unflattering.

You have two options. One option is to face your actor straight into the sun, to achieve an even exposure across the face. However, they're not going to enjoy delivering lines while squinting into the direct sunlight. The second, more reasonable, option is to use a reflector to bounce sunlight back into the shadow area of the face. This will massively reduce contrast.

Reflectors are fairly cheap to buy, and are basically huge silver-coloured surfaces designed to bounce light. You'll need an assistant to hold the reflector out of shot and will need to monitor how the angle affects the contrast on your actor's face. As a rough guide, you should position the reflector somewhere on the opposite side of the actor to the sun, and bounce the light back into the shadow area.

You can use smaller reflectors for close-ups, but for wide shots you may find that you need a much larger reflector. This ensures the reflector is kept out of shot, but still throws enough light back on your actor. In some situations more than one reflector gets you the best shot.

These are starting points. You can use the sun and reflectors in a number of inventive ways, so make sure you experiment.

Topics: tips, guide, video camera, making movies, film-making, diy, camcorder

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