Selfie Lighting for Talking Heads

Selfie Lighting

for Talking Heads

on Lockdown Sets

by Jamie Jobb

Channel-surfers everywhere now see cable-tv talking heads yacking at home in oddly-lit Lockdown situations. Some are reporters, some are pundits, some are senatorial souls. Some may be retired, but all are full of opinions. And since Covid-19 suddenly arrived on its live-feeds, broadcast television has shown itself to be totally unprepared for stay-at-home studios.

Obviously, most talking heads put more effort into dressing their dens and living rooms than considering how to properly light these “sets”. Further muddling the picture is the fact home video “broadcast quality” ranges from HD 1080p all the way down to fuzzy VHS. Who knew that to put on a “shelter-in-place” news show, networks would have to rely on their individual correspondents’ varied broadband connections?

This same smorgasbord of high and low quality “mug shots” may also describe the status of many Zoom chats and FaceTime gatherings. Setting up home studio lights may take a little time and effort but the payoff is a sharper image. And it doesn’t take more than three or four-steps to master home video lighting.

What follows is a quick break-down of a home studio setup for illuminating subjects seen by a laptop, smart phone, smart pad or other recording device. It’s based on illumination theories practiced by studios large and small. Of course a DIY set up would use a household’s most available lights, but Home Depot sells a handy little “portable luminaire, mini spotlight” by Intertek which is quite useful as it has a rheostat for controlling light levels.

The main point to remember: the effect of a particular lighting approach can be immediately evaluated by looking at the video and adjusting things in the moments of setup until the tone of the lighting is correct.

CNN studio (left) vs. home-studio misplaced lighting

(Maggie Haberman should move her light to one side) 

* * *

The Five Lights: 

Location, Location, Location 

1. Key Light – Just as the name implies, the key light is the main light. Normally this is the first light that gets set for any subject sitting as The Talent. It’s the primary source of light on the portrait. Outdoors, and often indoors, the sun is the obvious key light. So, the location of the key is key! A “high key” usually befits an upbeat airy tone, while a “low key” can create sinister shadowing, like a crystal ball below your chin!

Carole Lombard in “Low-Key” illumination

2. Fill Light – Also as the name implies, a fill light is the light that fills in shadows cast by the key. Fine studio lighting is often distinguished by subtle fill light. Sometimes outdoor photographers will use reflective devices to bounce sunlight as fill light into shadowed areas. Of course, the fill must be of lower luminosity than the key light.

3. “Kicker” or Rim Light produces the halo-effect produced by lights positioned aside the subject to outline and distinguish it from any background. Classic Hollywood films were very very well lit, particularly because of the exquisite kicker effects on women’s hats and hairdos.

Lombard again with “kicker” hair  

Lombard in full-figure “rim light”

4. Background – The light on the background of the set. Sometimes an absence of light may be best, as black or blank-toned backgrounds may work with existing ambient light, so in some lighting setups a strong background overrides any need for rim lighting a subject.

Then, there’s always what some photographers consider The First Resort:

5. “Natural” Light, which of course, is sunlight captured wherever it falls, indoors or out. Natural light can also be “bounced”, “masked” or “filtered” to create effects of key, fill, rim or back lighting. But natural light is ever-shifting, particularly on partly cloudy days. And direct sunlight may be four times hotter than fixtured lights, so the sun can “burn out” a video image if a photographer is not careful. Shooting in natural light requires a certain fleetness afoot for cast and crew. That’s why studios were built – to avoid that ever-shifting key light, the sun.

CAUTION: The sun and other hot “key” lights – including the bright light basking faces straight out of computer screens – create problems for video self-portraiture, blowing out the exposure (see Fat Joe photo above). If the subject is sitting at a computer, it’s best to have a hotter key light to the side, so the computer light acts as fill. This is something that’s easy to see in the necessary time it takes to set up a home studio for proper “chat” lighting. Also burnt-out portions of a frame can be cured by moving the too-hot light source further from the subject.

Randall Nott in his last role “I Am My Own Wife”

I Am My Own Light

Two years ago I was pressed into service in the booth of our local community theater, although I had no experience ever sitting in that hot seat. I was to work with a sound man and handle only light cues for the play, which ran in numbered sequence through a notebook copy of the script we followed there at the boards. It was all chronological.

The man who’d normally be sitting there, handling both sound and light, was now on stage acting out 34 roles in an incredible one-man play by Doug Wright, “I Am My Own Wife”. The actor was my friend Randall Nott, whose obituary is published elsewhere on these pages.

Randy was a most loyal local theater cohort – a brave actor I often used in my own plays and whose “Random Exits” I directed at the San Francisco Fringe Festival. When the local theater honored Randy with a memorial service last year, I told this story:

It was Randy’s second “Own Wife” performance, and he was not yet fully “off book”. So he was getting lost in the early pages of the text. So much so that he failed to deliver a pair of key lines in the proper sequence – The Actual Cues! – which meant our lights were suddenly out of sync. We’d lost our place on the page.

I frantically scanned the notebook to guess where we were in the script vs. where Randy’s words were landing on stage. And it didn’t matter much until I hit one cue which plunged the whole set into darkness. The End-of-Act-One cue!

Ever the trouper, Randy continued to run lines of his one-person dialogue, but knew the cues were so off at that point that he stopped and shouted “Twenty Two!” That made little sense to the audience as it was a message meant only for the booth – a direct statement of the number of the current light cue. And Randy was such a pro, I’m certain nobody in the audience understood the stage magic that just happened!

Lighting Links

As Lekos, parcans and fresnel spots get replaced by automated 21^st Century upgrades, performance lighting has undergone a radical transformation in recent years. However older lights may be reconfigured with more energy efficient bulbs and that has prolonged the life of many fixtures. Here are some textbooks which may be helpful:

“Motion Picture and Video Lighting” by Blain Brown. London: Focal Press, 2008. Thorough handbook full of deep details for controlled studio lighting.

“Stage Lighting In The Boondocks” by James Hull Miller. Colorado Springs: Meriwether Publishing, 1995. Tailored to the needs of folks working in civic and community theaters, schools and other local venues, with an eye on DIY budget solutions of those performance situations. The book was written at the end of the 20^th Century so it does not include low cost LED fixtures which are now used.

“Create Your Own Stage Lighting” by Tim Streader and John A. Williams. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985. Another DIY manual but for more complex theater performances.

“The Stage Lighting Handbook” by Francis Reid. New York: Routledge, 2001. Includes solid technical details as well as more aesthetic design approaches. Breaks down lighting specifics of various styles – dance, plays, musicals, operas, thrust stage lighting. A very thorough and handy book.