How to Approach Cinematic Lighting w/ DoP Jake Colletta
On Unify’s inaugural Crew’s Control podcast episode, Hudson asked Director of Photography Jake Colletta to give us a little secret sauce on his lighting approach, particularly relating to a Christmas soiree production he filmed for Disney. Ever heard of Disney? Us neither.
(Excerpts and paraphrasing directly from the podcast conversation, re-organized for flow.)
Layer w/ Light
I think when lighting, like in any art form, I honestly think of it a lot like painting. You know, when you're painting a picture - there's layers to it. You can just paint the blue sky and the white clouds and you have two colors now and cool - you know what you're looking at. But it can be a little bland. You're like, oh, I've seen this [scene] before. Let's add a little bit of gray to those clouds, add a little bit of texture, and add a little extra layer.
There are these different techniques you can implement to add more layers to that image to make it more visceral, to make it more interesting. And you can do the same thing with lighting.
Create Visual Points of Interest
Your goal as a cinematographer is not only to move the camera in a way that grabs people's attention and points their focus. You want do the same with light. If your backgrounds are way brighter than your foreground, you begin to lose your talent, and viewers’ attention is going to be directed more toward the background.
For the Disney project, we created our base layer - our kind of ambient world - and we knew our pockets where we’d have talent. We keyed our main players from there. We knew our camera moves would be from point A to point B. Okay cool, let’s make sure our moves are covered and up to level. Let’s get our backlights going - if we need a little ping of hair light here. We have some really nice stockings hanging by the fireplace, so we brought a special leako-ish fixture to give a kiss of light - to lift them up so your eyes are drawn to these areas.
Match Approach & Project
Lighting approach really depends on the type of project and the story. I mean, there are times where just a single hard-source backlight can be it, you know - it’s money. Or you could just be walking around with a bounce and that’s all you have. It can really vary.
In the instance of the Disney piece - there’s a lot of fast-paced cuts to bring energy to it. I knew we weren’t staying on any specific moment very long, outside of maybe one or two establishing shots or a wider look. It wasn’t a case where we needed our entire, consistent [lighting] level to move a ton with our talent. There was a moment where we had our gaffer with a diffusion sock and tube-light track with some of our talent. But yeah, it definitely varies.
Director of Photography: Jake Colletta
Agency: Disney Yellow Shoes
You can find more of DoP Jake Colletta’s work at www.jakecolletta.com
Listen to the full Crew’s Control episode with Jake here