From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography

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Lighting dialog scenes

Lighting dialog scenes

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography

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Lighting dialog scenes

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- In this tutorial, we're going to look at a simple way to light dialog scenes. As a matter of fact, just probably warning you that you're going to have a difficult time paying attention to movies because you're going to be noticing this lighting set up everywhere. Movies, TV shows, web series, all over the place. This technique is called a cross key or sometimes called a back cross key. It involves placing two key lights. One on each subject from behind them. You can see in our scene with Bitsy and Heather here that we're using a cross key. This light here on the left is Heather's key light. This key on the right is Bitsy's key. The magic of this trick is that each key light also doubles as a back light on the other character. So as we cut to the reverse of Bitsy, we see her key light, obviously, but we also see this nice edge light from Heather's key. Likewise, when looking at Heather, we see Bitsy's key light along the right side of Heather here. I also use this lighting set up in…

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