Learning Lighting – practice setups?

[Bgrunge]

Hello all,

I’m starting to learn lighting for filmmaking from scratch and need to practice a bit.

If I were to create and film 10 scenes to practice lighting setups, what should those lighting setups be? What’s the progression that would teach me the most (without costing too much)?

What I’m working with

– lights: 60w bi color, 230w bi color, and a couple of paper lanterns

– one bowens fresnel with barndoors, one softbox

– some fabrics for diffusion / bounce

– some light stands (no boom arms, can’t find reliable ones around here)

– some gaffer tape, clamps, black and white foamcore

Topic

[LucaM]

I think different DoPs would light the same scene in different ways (think to Suspiria, it’s in that way because Tovoli was not convinced about working on horror and decided  to create something unique and never seen before as a condition to do it, but another DoP maybe would have created a completely different movie) . I am unexperienced like you but i think the choice depends on the story you are trying to tell.  A romantic scene requires a different approach than a scary scene, i think, but there are sad romantic scenes and happy romantic scenes, melancholic horror movies and disgusting horror movies.  You could try by recreating scenes from movies you like or using the same gear to create completely different effects.

[Roger Deakins]

You might try crating as many different possible ‘looks’ using just one or two lights. I sometimes demonstrate this with a single Fresnel lamp, a sheet of diffusion, some silver foil and a white bounce board.

[Bgrunge]

Oh, like composition games! (randomly pick 3 pairs of composition concepts from a list or deck, combine each pair in its own photo).

I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me to try for lighting. Thanks

[Author]

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