How to Light a Video When the Room Has No Windows
Search this and you get film crew advice from 2017 about Fresnels and 12 by 12 silks, or a guide that tells you to find a room with a large window. Neither helps at 9pm in a spare room with one ceiling light. Here is what works with what you already own.
What is the first thing to do in a windowless room?
Turn the ceiling light off. Overhead light comes straight down, which puts shadow in your eye sockets, under your nose and under your chin. It is the lighting of a bad passport photo, and almost every unflattering home video is lit this way.
A windowless room is not a harder lighting problem than a room with a window. It is an easier one, because nothing is fighting you. You control every source.
How do you make a soft light without a softbox?
Point a lamp at a white wall and stand in the light that bounces back. That is the whole technique.
Softness is a function of how large the source appears from where you sit. A bare bulb is small and hard, so it carves sharp shadows. Bounce that same bulb off a metre of white wall and the wall becomes the source, which is now enormous relative to your face, and the shadows go gentle.
Anything white and large works. A wall, a ceiling, a bedsheet on a door, a sheet of white card. Bouncing costs you roughly half to two thirds of the light, so use the brightest lamp in the house and put it closer rather than buying anything.
If you own a ring light or a small LED panel, the same rule applies. Do not point it straight at your face from 40cm. Bounce it, or push it through a diffuser, or at minimum move it further away and off to one side.
Where exactly should the light go?
About 45 degrees to one side of the camera, and raised to just above your eye level, angled slightly down.
That position leaves a small shadow on one side of the nose, which is what gives a face shape. Light coming from directly beside the camera flattens everything out and looks like a webcam. Light from below looks like a horror film. Light from directly above is the ceiling light you just turned off.
Then fill the shadow side. Put something white about a metre away on the opposite side, a wall, a bedsheet, a piece of card, and it bounces enough back to lift the dark half without erasing the shape.
How do you stop mixed light ruining the colour?
Use one type of bulb, or match them.
Household light is a mix of colour temperatures. A warm incandescent or filament bulb sits around 2700 to 3000K, a neutral LED around 4000K, a daylight bulb around 5600K. A camera can match one of them, not two. Light a face with a warm lamp on one side and a daylight LED on the other and one half of the face goes orange while the other goes blue, and no amount of grading fully fixes it.
So pick one. Switch off every bulb that does not match your key light, then set white balance manually to roughly match what is left, and lock it. Auto white balance drifts mid take, so a wall changes colour when you turn your head.
What do you do about the background?
Get distance behind you and put one dim light back there.
A windowless room is often small, which pushes you close to a wall. A flat wall right behind your head gives the image no depth and reads as a flat cut out of a person. Leave at least 1.5 metres if the room allows it. Filming into the corner of a room beats filming at a flat wall, because two surfaces at different distances give the eye something to read.
Then add one small source behind you and out of frame. A lamp on the floor pointed at the back wall, a strip light, anything dim. A background one or two stops darker than your face with a single highlight in it is the difference between deliberate and accidental.
What can you use if you own no lights at all?
More than you would expect, and all of it bounced rather than aimed.
- A desk lamp pointed at a white wall. The standard answer.
- A second phone's torch through a sheet of printer paper, as a fill on the shadow side. Weak, but usable close up.
- A laptop or monitor displaying a full screen white page. Genuinely useful as a soft frontal fill, and its colour temperature is consistent.
- A bedside lamp with the shade left on, which is already a diffuser.
- A white pillowcase over a lampshade to soften a harsh bulb, as long as it is not touching a hot one.
One good source plus one bounce beats three bad ones every time.
What settings should the camera be on?
Keep ISO as low as the light allows, and add light rather than gain. If you can see grain crawling in the shadows, the answer is a brighter lamp or a closer one, not a higher ISO.
Set shutter angle to 180 degrees, or shutter speed to double your frame rate, so 1/60 at 30fps. One wrinkle specific to artificial light: mains power runs at 50Hz in Australia and the UK and 60Hz in the US, and some LED and fluorescent fittings flicker at that rate, which shows as rolling bands in the image. If you see banding, move your shutter to a multiple of the local mains frequency, 1/50 or 1/100 on 50Hz and 1/60 or 1/120 on 60Hz, and it clears.
Common questions
Can you film a good video in a room with no windows? Yes, and often more consistently than with a window, because nothing changes when a cloud passes.
Is a ring light good enough on its own? It works, but it flattens the face when placed straight on. Move it 45 degrees to one side and raise it slightly and the same light looks far better.
What colour temperature should I use indoors at night? Whatever your key light actually is, as long as everything else matches it. Around 3200K for warm bulbs, around 4000K for neutral LEDs. Consistency matters more than the number.
Why does my video look grainy in a dark room? ISO is too high. Add or move light rather than raising gain further.
How far should the light be from my face? Close enough to be the brightest thing in the room, far enough that it is not falling off sharply across your face. Around 1 to 1.5 metres bounced is a reasonable start.
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