How To Fall In Love With Lighting

Introduction: Conrad Hall was right

Maybe your brain DVR fast forwarded right to your favorite images when you read the title. Or simply a visually stunning moment that’s been stuck in your brain today. 

Light is a gift from the supernatural - a promise of hope from the gods. Darkness can’t overtake it. Man can rarely tame it. You can’t touch it but you can feel it.

A cinematographer may spend hours lighting a scene with a room of collaborators only to be bolstered by the same light done better as the sun hits a park bench on your walk home from set. Let’s practice futility together and attempt to bring more respect and indebtedness to the unattainable. 

Wabi Sabi, baby

The Japanese art form of finding joy in imperfection. Roger Bennett puts it best here:

“an appreciation for imperfection and impermanence, and seeing ethereal beauty in those things.” Don’t pretend to understand it. The moment you have it mastered is the moment you’ve lost perspective. 

Pretend to understand it 

We’ve already hit the great contradiction! As filmmakers we cannot proceed in fear. While the tidal wave of possible lighting solutions can consume us, we must find courage amongst it. Part of a John Wayne quote from the completely credible website Quote Fancy tells us while nestled amongst a stock footage background: “…courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.” 

All your old ways keep on slowin' up the progress

Don’t let the process get in the way. If your $10 budget buster Home Depot light is giving you the look you want, lean into it. I can’t promise a like on instagram but I can promise you’re one step closer to pure signal flow of creativity on your project. We’ll have the money to do things on a project, and then we’ll lose that money on the same project. And on the next show we’ll have everything we need to accomplish the lighting diagrams of the all-time great filmmakers only to have the project shelved because the lead talent fell in love with balloon animals and ran off to Six Flags for the year. 

"You can only control what you can control. Which is nothing. That’s the optimal process! Please don’t stop reading. Here’s what you can control - your preparation."

‍Preparation: Build it and ideas will come

Watch films on silent 

Watch your favorite movies without the sound on and really watch what’s happening and why your favorite scenes hit you the way they do. You may catch something that you’ve never caught before when all of your senses were reacting to the original experience. 

There’s no wrong movie for this exercise

Learn to turn off the Letterboxd critic and find new ways to connect to material you were previously shut off to. "Heavyweights" means a lot to me because a movie about kids at a weight loss camp spoke directly to me at a time when I needed that laugh. I’ll never have that first viewing experience again, but who I was when I saw it shaped a piece of my story. And I often think about the way it looked and the way it made me feel. 

Create moodboards that spark joy

Build a mood board with Frame Set. Maybe you’ve never built a mood board, but maybe you’ve made a collage in elementary school featuring your christmas wish list of Power Rangers flippy head action figures or a playlist for the summer road trip. It’s all the same thing - condense the vibe you want to feel into one place. If it means something to you, it’s worth collecting. 

Final Word: Less words

The title was obvious clickbait but the task at hand has truth to it. When you love something, you should love it unashamed and withholding nothing. The love of lighting opened the door to a career in filmmaking for me. More importantly, it’s another path to empathy for the human condition.