Lighting a room with one lamp

Yuna Sato and cinematographer Ama Boateng have made two films together: Signal, a music video shot over three nights in Tokyo, and The Long Field, our short set on a farm in winter. Both are lit almost entirely by lamps, signs and windows that appear in the frame. We sat down with them in the grade suite to talk about how that works in practice. The conversation has been edited for length.

Where the approach started

Yuna: On Signal we had nine people and no lighting truck. The city was already lit. The question was never what to add, only what to choose. Ama would walk a street, point at a sign and say, that one, she stands there.

Ama: The only unit we carried was a red LED tube, about a metre long, on a battery. Everything else was the location. Once you work like that for three nights you start to see light differently. You stop asking where the key is and start asking which lamp is the key.

One lamp, three jobs

Ama: In the farmhouse on The Long Field, most scenes have one table lamp in shot. That lamp is doing three things. It is the key on the face nearest to it, it is the edge on whoever is across the table, and it is the reason the room falls away to black behind them. If it is in the right place, you are done.

Yuna: The right place is usually six inches from where the art department put it. We moved a lot of lamps.

Ama: And changed a lot of bulbs. We swapped every practical for a dimmable bulb, warmer than the windows, and put the bigger ones on a small dimmer board so we could adjust them between takes without anyone walking into frame. The trick is to bring the lamp down until the shade stops clipping, then expose for the face.

The window is the second source

Yuna: Winter in Norway gives you about six hours of usable daylight, and all of it is low and blue. That became the other half of the look.

Ama: We never fought the window. If a scene needed more, we put a large diffusion frame outside and bounced a lamp into it, so it still read as daylight. Inside, the table lamp handles the warm side. The grade is mostly about keeping those two colours apart.

What it costs, and what it gives

Ama: It is slower to set up and faster to shoot. Moving one lamp takes a minute. Relighting a room with stands and flags takes an hour. And because there is nothing on stands, the actors can go anywhere. We could turn round and shoot the reverse without rigging a thing.

Yuna: It changes the performances too. The room looks like a room. Nobody is standing in a pool of light waiting for a mark. On The Long Field that mattered, because the whole film is about a woman in a house that has gone too quiet.

The one rule

Yuna: If the audience cannot see where the light is coming from, it should at least make sense that it could.

Ama: And carry one more bulb than you think you need.