What is Back Light in Video Production?

Video Transcript

"Now I'm going to talk about the back light, which is technically the least essential light, the key light being the most important, the fill light being fairly important. But, the back light is a part of 3 point lighting and something you should know. Basically the purpose of the back light is to separate me from my background. How it does that is, this is our back light right here, it shines a little bit of light on the top of my head, kind of get that reflection, you get what's called the halo effect. Start watching movies for that, movies and T.V., and you'll see it all over the place. The other thing it's doing is putting a little light on the back of my shoulders which creates a line, and that separates me from the background along with that halo effect. It might not be as obvious because we got a pretty light-colored wall, but I'll just go ahead and turn off that back light. Hopefully you can see a little bit. It's just a little bit duller now. With the back light on, hopefully we got a little bit of shininess on the top of my head and on my shoulders. Light-color shirt, white wall -not the best situation for this. You can definitely see it with a darker background. But that's what the back light does is separating your subject from the background. I said it's the least important, but it's little differences like that that's really going to make your lighting stand out. People won't be saying, "that looks like a bunch of clamp lights," it'll look like a real lighting setup because you're taking real lighting techniques and just using the lighting equipment you can afford to get a good lighting setup."