Filming Romantic Scenes
How to Create a Romantic Look with 3 Techniques
I would happily make the bet that almost everyone reading this article has at one time placed a torch underneath their chin to create a spooky face. When light is directed from underneath, it unconventionally extenuates facial features and projects shadows into usually viewable areas, which feels abnormal and therefore perfect for horror.
This is not just a technique employed by young girls at a sleepover trying to scare each other; you will also find it throughout horror films since the dawn of cinema. And just as horror has generic conventions with lighting, so does romance.
Today in Four Minute Film School, Director of Photography Valentina Vee explores what exactly goes into romantic lighting and how to do it yourself.
The Premise for this tutorial is that two young women are on a date at a restaurant in LA; sitting outside in the exterior dining area at nighttime. The date is going well until it isn’t. But at least for the romantic segment of the scene, we want to make the composition filled with love.
Romantic Lighting
You could say that there are three key components of creating a romantic atmosphere, and they are:
· Warm light
· Soft light
· Motivational light
Let’s break these down:
Warm Light
Red is the color of love and passion. As a result, we typically associate warm lighting with intimacy and comfort, and therefore when creating a romantic nighttime scene you will want to use warm light.
Warm Light is typically associated with light with a color temperature from 1000 Kelvin to 4000 Kelvin (you can learn more about Kelvin in this video). There are a few methods you can employ to get this color temperature.
The first and most rational is to use tungsten-based lighting. Tungsten has a color temperature of 3200k, so it’s naturally warm. However, using tungsten (bulb) lights require a lot of power, and produce heat quickly on set. Therefore, you would be better served using LED lights that replicate the warm color of tungsten fixtures.
If you’re slightly new to filmmaking, you may associate LED lighting with bright daylight (white) based light, but LEDs can also be tungsten-balanced, and in fact, we make a few bi-color (both day and tungsten) based lights, such as the Aputure LS 300X, LS 60x, and LS Mini 20C.
If you only have daylight-balanced LEDs, you can use CTO (color temperature orange) gel to limit the blue light waves and produce a warmer color temperature. However, as noted by Valentina in the tutorial, when you stack gels to produce a warmer color, you’re also lessening the light intensity. Take that into account if you’re only using LED fixtures with no practical lighting.
Soft Light
As romantic scenes are inviting and warm, you don’t want to use hard lighting to create contrast and harsh shadows. Everything should be pleasing to the eye to add to the intimate moment. As such, you would want to use soft light.
You obtain soft light by using a large light source. However, unless you’re using the evening sun, large light sources can be costly and require heavy machinery to set up.
As a result, it is more than likely that you will have a smaller light. But small lights can create soft light too. For instance, if you use a small softbox like the Light Dome Mini II at 3 feet away it will be softer than using a larger Light Dome II softbox from 10 feet away. Soft light is relative to how large the source of light compared to the distance it is from the subject.
One way to soften a light is by placing a layer of diffusion material between the light and the subject to spread the beam. Now think of the diffusion sheet as your light source, it will only soften the light relative to how far it is from your subject. Clipping a diffusion on a light doesn’t make it a “soft light” if it’s still far away.
You can also try bouncing light into a reflective material instead to create a larger source. Just remember, the larger the source the softer the light.
Motivated Light
When we close in on the big romantic scene of the film, you will usually find that the lighting consists of string lights, candles, firelight, or dim lamps. As they generically set the tone for intimate moments.
However, for filmmaking, those lights alone are usually not enough to obtain sufficient illumination. Unless filming with an f/0.7 lens as John Alcott did for the 1975 Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon. And that’s where motivational lighting comes in.
It’s a term that describes when the lights off-camera imitate a natural source within the scene. So, for example, we would use a 300X to enhance the string lights instead of using it to create a sense of ambient light that equally illuminates the whole area. Therefore, you would want the light to match the color temperature and softness of the practical.
How We Did It.
With the basics covered, let’s look at how we put that into practice.
Romantic scenes set at night are a genre convention. After all, you can’t exactly have a candlelight dinner in the middle of the day. I mean, you could, but it wouldn’t feel right! As a result, you’re likely going to be filming a romantic scene at night. To avoid prolonged shooting through the night to the early hours of the morning, look to set up your initial lighting design in the day.
Of course, you won’t be able to see what the result will look like directly, but as soon as night draws in, you can flick the power switch on and quickly adjust and start shooting instead of having to set up late at night.
First, we set up our practical lights, including a mix of string lights and Christmas lights. The sparkle of light is a key generic convention for romantic scenes. Both metaphorically and visually, it isolates the romantic couple under the stars.
Thankfully due to the improvement of low-cost LED technology, you don’t need to pull out the old school Christmas bulbs to get this twinkle. Instead, you can pick up inexpensive LED string lights which are battery-powered, and when used in abundance with a shallow depth of field, it will create that beautiful romantic sparkle.
However, as seen in the video tutorial, one strip of the LED lights was of the wrong frequency and was causing flicker on the screen. Therefore, make sure you purchase the lights that are localized to your region. 60hz for NTSC and 50hz for PAL.
Additionally, string LED lights usually come in two flavors: cool or warm. Consequently, make sure you pick up the warm variation if you intend on using them for romantic scenes.
The second practical we’re going to place into the composition is a candle. However, we’re going to get a production designer to make sure the candle has burned relatively low. For what reason? Well, in the wide, it doesn’t necessarily matter that the candle isn’t producing enough light to illuminate our talent. However, when we push into a close-up, we’re going to want to see that candlelight flicker.
As the candle has burned low and will not be in the frame, we can remove the candle and replace it with an Aputure MC. With the MC, we can not only increase the illumination to give the talent more fill but program the light in one of its many customized settings to produce a candlelight flicker. As the audience has already seen the candle in the wide, they subconsciously tie that light on the face to a candle when we cut closer.
While this looks decent, it doesn’t look very lively. It looks as if the only lighting in this area is the string lights.
Another typical genre convention of romantic dinner scenes is to have the ambient fill from the restaurant, and other establishments, softly spill into the scene. You don’t want this light to overpower the practicals but to supplement them.
To do this, we had an Aputure LS 600d Pro light up the shop window on the left of the frame, and because it’s an incredibly bright light, this was set at 0.1% power and diffused through the sheers on the window. For the light on the right, we used the less intense Aputure LS 300dII and used a light dome to soften the light further. And each light was gelled with a full CTO gel to match the color temperature of the practicals.
If you’re filming in a location that doesn’t have a window behind your talent and find that the scene is falling a little dark, look to improvise by what is at the location. On our site, we were lucky enough to have wall sconces, and we were able to take out the bulbs, and replace them with B7c’s and adjust the color temp via the Sidus Link app.
This is the before;
And After;
How romantic!
Setup 2
While the initial setup works well for the wide, the practical lighting isn’t powerful enough to sufficiently give the talent the dynamic fill they need. Therefore, we used an Aputure 300x with a lantern attachment to key the actors from the far side.
The lantern produces a beautifully soft-shaped light, and like the candle trick, because we can’t distinguish the directionality of the 300x, we assume the wall lights are illuminating the talent.
We did run into a consistent issue throughout the shoot, however. While we’re able to control the lights on set, it doesn’t mean we can maintain the lights on the buildings around us, and as a result, we had a cold light piercing the scene. Therefore, be sure to double-check your composition before rolling to look for rogue light spills, and once found, use a floppy to block that light.
Gear Setup
As usual, we’re using the Canon C70 with XEEN Cine Primes, but in particular, we’ve settled with the 85mm for this shoot. Not only does the longer focal length isolate our subjects and further put them in their own romantic world, but the compression of the longer focal length also further knocks the lights out of focus which increases the dreamy and romantic bokeh created from the string lights.
While the term ‘love is in the air’ may be figurative, we can certainly add some romantic charm to the atmosphere with a lens filter. Adding a Tiffen Pearlescent filter creates beautiful soft bloom around the edges of the lights, further enhancing the romantic notion. However, due to the material that forms the blooming, you’ll find that there’s an abundance of flaring when moving the camera. So if you ever use Pro-Mist or Pearlescent, you’ll need to keep the camera static or at least move it in a direction where the variety of lights is out of view.
Be sure to check out the entire Four Minute Film School playlist on Aputure’s Official YouTube channel, and stay creative.
