Lighting Music Videos - The good thing about shooting in studios

Although you will be working hard and sweating on many projects, some might get pushed back or canceled altogether. I was "DPing" (not sure if thats even a word) this music video with my colleagues from YouFilms—shout out to them, some of the greatest crew you could ask for! Endless creative ideas flow when working with them.

For this project, we wanted to create a super dark and almost isolated feel for the location. Ideally, we wanted a massive blacked-out room where we could position the artist in the middle and light him up, but as it often happens with low-budget shoots, you can't always realize what's in your head. Thankfully, we had access to a medium-sized studio with black-painted walls, which allowed us to place the artist in the middle and gave us flexibility with the angles.

We were shooting on my Sony FX6 with some vintage Contax Zeiss lenses. While I could have shot at the second base ISO of 12,800, it tends to get quite noisy in the shadows, so I prefer to shoot at 800 ISO to keep the shadows clean. Fortunately, we had plenty of lighting available for this shoot: an Aputure 600d, an Amaran 200x, an Aputure F22C, and a few tube lights.

The first issue we encountered was that, at normal exposure for the artist, the back walls were still visible (we couldn’t pull him further from the walls). The only way to fix this was to blast the key light and then expose for his face, which effectively clipped the back walls. I was worried we might end up with noisy footage, but I’m glad it came out clean at 800 ISO, which usually gives you clean shadows, at least in my experience.

For one of the first shots, the artist was supposed to be tied to a chair, so we made it look dramatic by avoiding soft lighting. We boomed the 200x overhead, which had plenty of output for this shot, and added some haze to emphasize the light beam. The scene was meant to feel like a dirty warehouse with old tungsten bulbs hanging from the ceiling. We considered making the light sway, but it was inconsistent with the boom arm, and since we hadn’t planned for it, we didn’t have the right equipment.

In another scene, we had the artist being buried in sand up to his neck. We struggled with how to create this effect, but the easiest solution we found was to grab a large Ikea tub lid, cut a hole just big enough for his head to fit through, and tape around the gaps so the sand wouldn’t leak out. For this shot, we didn’t want a dramatic look, so we used either the 200x or 600d with a large octagon dome diffuser to soften the light. We added a honeycomb grid to prevent light from spilling onto the walls. Most of the lighting was top-down for this scene, as it turned out.

One of the coolest shots, in my opinion, was where the artist is being tortured by someone in a sink. Setting this up was more logistical than creative. We used a fish tank I owned and filled it with water. I recommend using warm water because the glass was fogging up from my breath as I looked through the camera, and warm water should also be more comfortable for the artist. We set the tank up between two tables, leaving a gap just wide enough for the lens to fit through and focus on him, while supporting the tank’s weight. The gap was around 15-20 cm.

Lighting for this scene was simple—we set up the 200x with a softbox and angled it at 45 degrees to light one side of the artist’s face and a bit of the arm pushing him down. In hindsight, I could have added a backlight, but I liked how it looked on the monitor. Once the lighting was set, we were ready to shoot the moment where his head was pushed underwater.

There were a few other scenes that I'll dive into another time. Overall, this was a great learning experience, especially when it came to pushing my camera’s limits in low-light situations. Hopefully, we’ll finish this project soon and release it for everyone to enjoy. I hope you found this interesting and maybe even learned something. Thanks for taking the time to read it!