What is Key Light in Video Production?

Video Transcript

"Now I'm going to talk specifically about the key light. It is your most important light. If you had to set only one light, it would be your key light. It's basically where the brightest part of the persons face that you're lighting is, where that is. You can see this is my key light right here. Let's look at what happens when you turn that off. Obviously, it got darker. More importantly, you see that my face is just kind of flat now, there's no contrast between each side. We've got some professional lights back there that are still lightning me. If this had been my only key light, it just would have got really dark, but let's hit that back on. Now we're back. So you see, what I try to do is I'm going to light this side. This side is where the fill is, I'm going to talk about the next, but try to get just a little bit of light right there coming from that key, that brighter light. That's essentially what that key is doing is putting the...you want to set it to one side of the face like that. You're trying to light that one side and give it a little bit more light. That's what's creating this contrast, what gives the video more of a 3-D look. It just feels more right. If you're putting this directly in front of me and it's just blanketing my face with light, it looks flat. The whole point of the 3 point lighting is to get some dimension here, and we do that with the brighter key light. I know if I'm using all the same kind of bulbs, to get this brighter, it's closer to me. That's one way to get things brighter and lighter, especially with these low wattage bulbs you might need to be kind of close to get bright. Just moving it a couple inches away it's going to get significantly darker. So that's a little bit more about the key light."