Getting decent lighting indoors, fast & cheap

A while ago I did a social media commercial shoot with one of my friends Eivind André Bjørnø for the norwegian clothing reseller Kleins. We went to 4 locations all over the city in one day and got around 25 shots.
With no lighting the results could be something like:

Example of hard top heavy lighting

Lighting from the spotlights in the store

More diffused, yet still top heavy lighting in one of the stores. That fresnel is off.

Why is this terrible?

Top heavy lighting is terrible for commercials and corporate videos because you want to see a persons eyes. Having no lighting in the eyes is like the subject wearing sunglasses. There is no connection. You are alienated from the subject. Not to mention films use it to show misery and loneliness. We wanted to show honest employees and managers talking about their stores and customers. So the audience connecting with the people in the videos is key.

How do we fix it?

Relight the entire store! Just kidding, that's what a feature film would do. We are two guys, DoP/Director/Sound recordist Eivind Bjørnø and me, the gaffer/AC. And we are going to make these people look great. For example like this:

The day's 2nd interview, 1st location. Love how the kicker is hitting his cheekbone. Depth of field in the camera was kept quite deep to show the store.

Our preconditions are:

• We will use as much available light as possible to save time.
• We will carry minimum equipment to save time and money.
• We will only be two film workers to keep costs down (+ the DoP's girlfriend who took pictures for the company and carried my sandbags now and then)

So, what do we do?

​​1. FLAG THE STORE LIGHTING OFF THE SUBJECT

Here we are blocking one of the spotlights that was casting a hard light on her face and producing an ugly nose shadow towards us. We could have found a ladder, climbed up, and turned the spotlight. There is no guarantee the store has a ladder, and this is in my opinion faster and less intrusive.

Cutting the hard roof lights off our subject

​ 2. Add a soft key light

Notice how I turned all the roof spots away to avoid direct hard light

We lost some light removing those spotlights. Now it's time to add some of our own. Lighting the subject a stop or two over the background is good because our eyes are drawn to the brightest spot in the frame. It also creates separation.

Could probably have gone even brighter on the key here.

Need a softer source? Increase the surface area relative to the subject! The diffusion makes the source bigger so it softens and flattens wrinkles. In my case I knew one of the employees had some wrinkles, and I hacked together this cheap solution from things in my home. No time, money or space in the car to set up a diffusion frame. And this setup surprisingly enough survived being moved around!

​3. Add a hairlight/kicker

Almost always good to get some seperation from the background. And a hairlight and or kicker just makes things look high production value. The little extra effort really does it.

My chinese 650W fresnel adding that kicker

We prioritized hairlight on the women for beauty, and kickers on the men, for that masculine look

I don't think key lighting from the left was the right choice here. It would have been better if we swapped the lights or he looked to the left of camera.

That's better

Giving the store manager behind the cameraman some hairlight. Put neutral density gel on the spots to dim them down.

The results turned out pretty decent, especially considering the time we had. All our equipment and two people fit in this medium size car.

Eivind unloading our equipment from the car.

Hope you enjoyed! I appreciate questions, comments or criticism, and can be reached @tonivuc on twitter/instagram or in the comments here.