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Fill Light: The Underdog of Lighting

This still is from a corporate project I shot a long, long time ago. It’s about corporate espionage, and I wanted to create a moody look while being able to relight quickly for closeups and such. In this shot the key light on the woman was an open-face tungsten unit, probably a 1K, pushed through a 4’x4’ frame of Lee 129 diffusion. Lee 129 is very, very dense stuff, and I love it because the diffusion becomes a very flat even source that’s wonderfully soft and wraps around anything. We also hid 4’x4 tube Kino Flos along the walls above the bar, where the wall meets the ceiling, as a general soft back/side light.

This is a diagram of the fill units only. (There’s a third person, on the left, that isn’t shown in this frame.) This setup created a soft even base light that was very flattering to everything it saw. There’s something about a large diffuse source at camera or head level that creates a very flattering flatness. I don’t know how else to describe it, other than to point back to this example:

The highlights in the center of round objects is probably what makes this technique shine (literally).

In this example, the key is also the fill. (Key and fill are kind of arbitrary terms anyway. I hate using them to describe lighting plots because they are a bit formulaic, and lighting is anything but formulaic.) The foreground actor is lit by a Kino Flo Vista Beam laying on the ground to the right of the camera and aimed through a frame of light diffusion. There’s a vertical 4’x4 Kino Flo hidden behind the window frame to the right adding sidelight, and the guy in the background is lit by a 1’x1’ LED panel.

This is an excellent example of keeping all of the lighting on one side of a person’s face. The Vista Beam is filling from the right side of the camera, the Kino Flo edge is also on the right but further around… it all blends together very naturally and creates a very striking image. I especially like how the low fill strikes the actor’s face: it feels very natural, as if light is bouncing off a floor or desk, yet the contrast and desaturation make this “portrait” appear very ominous.

You can read more about this project here.

In this case there’s fill coming from two directions: through an 8’x8’ grid cloth rigged behind the camera, for the almost shadowless fill lighting the boy, and another massive 12’x20’ bounce off the right side of the set that you can sense on the back wall. (The 8’x8’ grid behind the camera is a little offset to the left to bring some modeling and shadow to the boy’s chin line and ear.)

This project was shot on a Phantom at 1000fps so using big sources seemed like the right thing to do: we needed 1000fc just to get to a T2, so lining up a lot of very bright lights and bouncing or heavily diffusing them gave us a nice base level that only required occasional bright accents, like the additional soft light on the girl’s face or the back lights on the dog and the curtains.

You can read more about this project here.

This project you won’t read about anywhere, as it’s totally top secret. I can’t tell you anything about it other than how we lit it. This project required two angles, shot at the same time:

And the layout (of the chimeras only; back light was a dimmed 2K zip, and there were specials on various background objects):

The solution was to use two medium chimeras, nearly side by side. The “A” chimera created a fair bit of modeling for the front camera, and became an edge light for the side camera. The “B” chimera was to the right of the first one and was fill for the front camera angle and a key for the side camera.

The next three images are all from the same project, a low budget piece to lure financiers for a low budget feature. Shot on an HVX-200 and using a four-light Arri kit and some bounce cards, we did a lot with a little. The look is very much derived by filling from the key side.

In the first image, above, the key is a light bounced into a soft silver reflector off the right side of frame. This sidelights the actor’s right arm and left hand and makes them pop. The fill, which is bounced from just to the right of the lens, wraps that light around and fills in the shadows subtly but beautifully. All the shadows in the shot come from the same side of the camera, which I find to be a very interesting look. There’s something magical about hiding multiple shadows by making them fall the same direction: they blend instead of compete. This isn’t always desirable, and sometimes a large soft fill from opposite the key side is necessary, but I really do like the fill-from-the-key-side look.

There’s also a silver reflector hidden in the back left corner of the room to edge light the left hand and separate the left arm from the back wall.

This shot uses much the same approach: a light is bounced off a silver reflector from frame left that rakes across the actress’s body, creating highlights on her arms and texture in non-black clothing like her pants. The fill is from the left side of camera and is probably a small light bounced off 4’x4’ foam core. There’s another bounce light coming from the right rear of the shot to give her a little edge light while also illuminating and bringing out textures in the background.

Look at all the tones on her left arm, starting with a nice highlight and wrapping gradually around into darkness. The detail on her frame left hand is amazing: thumb and forefinger are nicely side lit, and the fill accentuates the creases in her fingers and the palm of her hand. This is where the height of the fill can make a big difference. Fill above the lens is very different from fill at lens height, and fill from below the lens does different things yet again. It’s important to look at the shot and decide what’s important, and in this case—where I don’t have to worry about perfectly lighting a face—I can instead focus lighting to emphasize textures and volume.

This was a very, very simply lit shot. The swimmers are facing a roll-up door and are lit by soft skylight, but because the roll-up door is next to a wall the skylight can only reach them from the side and behind. Added to that is a single 1K open-face tungsten unit, uncorrected, that highlights the stool. Once again all the light is coming from the same direction, but the fill is much farther around the side than normal. (We could probably call it a soft key, with the tungsten accent light really a back light. Think about it however you like; it’s not important what you call the lights as long as you get them to work for you.)

You can read more about this project, and see lighting diagrams, here.

The last example I’ll offer (for now) is this one, where the key is effectively fill. This was a project launch video for Microsoft’s Zune and we shot a bunch of actors bouncing up and down on a trampoline holding Zune mockups. As I had no idea what the actors would do while in the air (they didn’t know either until they did it!) we put a 12’x20’ bounce below the lens, with the top of the bounce immediately under the lens for more vertical wrap. Then we put bounces in the rear corners of the stage to create the soft highlights on either side of the actors’ faces. Soft light from the lens axis can look very smooth and glamorous but might appear a little flat and dead in situations where, like this, the background is brighter than the foreground. The additional highlights prevent this shot from being boring, but the soft light from near the lens gives it a subtle “fashion model” beauty.

Conrad Hall, ASC used to speak about “room tone,” not in the context of sound but in the context of lighting. He espoused the theory that there is always a base level of light coming from somewhere in a room that sets the tone for the scene, and part of his lighting process was to find that spot and put the appropriately-sized source, of the appropriate intensity, in that spot.

I’ve not quite reached the point where I can find that spot and then not move it when the camera angle changes drastically, but it’s a goal I’m shooting for. For now, though, placement of the fill light is currently of the utmost importance to my lighting technique. While the fill light is -only- lighting the shadows of a scene it is equal to the key light in importance when defining the look, feel, mood and glamor of a scene. Where you hide the fill light, or whether you hide the fill light, makes a huge difference. Where you place it can make or break how the actors look on camera. And having a small mobile fill light can make or break a day by allowing you to clean up closeups quickly without having to move any other lights. It may only be lighting the shadows, but shadows are half of any picture.

Art Adams is a DP who likes to live on the dark side. His website is at www.artadamsdp.com.

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The Best of Stunning Good Looks Art Adams | 08/30 A directory of my best articles, sorted by topic. This entry is a guide to my best articles, sorted by topic. Enjoy!

NAB 2012: Assorted Snapshots Adam Wilt | 05/08 A few cool things I saw at the show that didn’t fit into any other articles. NAB is too big a show in too short a time to see more than a fraction of it. I’ve covered a few things in some depth (as have other PVC folks), but there’s plenty more that slips by without proper coverage. Here, I have a few photos…

NAB 2012: Trucolor Ohm Space Light Bruce A Johnson | 04/20 400 watts of LED replaces a 6K?  Sounds good to me. Next time you need to flood a room with soft light - in whatever color temperature - you should give the Ohm a look.

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Thanks for posting this Art, very nice stuff

Posted by Bret  on  09/27  at  01:23 PM

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Excellent article, very helpful.  Thank you.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/29  at  01:05 PM

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Yes, more useful concepts & techniques and that viral had me dying after an initial moment of WTF!!! lol… Now I have to go read some of your other articles. I Love this state of perpetual learning that defines our biz…kill me when I think I know it all. Ciao, XL

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  10/07  at  12:21 PM

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Is the fill light nowadays an important thing in your eyes, with all the other technigues en light available?

Nice articel btw.

Posted by bindingsangst test  on  02/28  at  01:03 PM

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