Video: What is Background Light in Video Production?

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Good video production has a lot of details, especially in lighting. Learn how to use background lights for videos in this free video clip about lighting tips for film makers.

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Video Transcript

Now I'll talk about what's called the background light. It's not a part of your 3 point lighting setup, but I buy four clamp lights just so I could use a background light if I needed to. Basically what it's used for is to cast a little light on your background and just give you a more visually appealing scene. Most likely you want it to look more natural; you don't want to just throw something up. Just to demonstrate what it looks like, this is what we've done. So I'm turning it off and you can see where it went. It's right here. There's just a lamp on the floor that's shining up and creating just a kind of effect. Put it back on. It might make things a little more interesting. This is definitely something to experiment with. It's a lot harder to get this to look good than it is to just throw up a key light. It might be that you can't get it to look good. But if you had something like a curtain back there, you shot a background light on it, you're going to see a lot of different contrasts because of the waves of the curtain, and just kind of a cool thing to put back there instead of just having a single-colored curtain, you have this little accent light putting some light on a certain part of it, and you're getting a lot of cool shadows because of the way the light's hitting different curves in the curtain. So that's another thing to think about is setting up that background light. It's not anything to do with your subject at all. It's all about making that background just a little bit more interesting.

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What is Background Light in Video Production?

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