Cinematography is all about lighting

(gentle music) - Whoops. I have this little kiddie pool. Nobody got hurt. All good. Okay, so camera's rolling. Hi, my name is Zach Mulligan. I'm a cinematographer working in film and television. You may know some of my work from HBO's "The Outsider," or from my Sundance film, "We The Animals," which was there in 2018. Cinematography really is all about lighting. Today, I'd like to really break down how I like to think about lighting and how I like to approach it on set. So I like to think of lighting in terms of its basic elements. We'll be doing seven lessons, one for each element of lighting. After each lesson, there'll be a brief exercise, so we have the direction of the light, shape of the light, color, intensity, quality, texture, and movement. I'd also like to say with all these elements, with direction with any one of these elements, I really don't believe in there being any rules. I think that you should approach each element completely on your own. I encourage you to play with each one of these elements, play with the direction of the lighting. The conventional wisdom is often wrong for the story we're trying to tell. So for each lesson, we'll demonstrate how I use these elements in my own work. I will be showing a lot of examples from the film, "We The Animals." So at the end of the course, I'd like to do a final project where we synthesize everything we've learned by shooting a short haiku. I call it a video haiku. We follow the structure of a real haiku poem. We take three shots, and each shot synthesizes what we've learned about lighting, but we're trying to combine them to tell a bigger story. So one other quick note, I designed this course during the COVID-19 pandemic. And with that in mind, everything you need for this course should be laying around your house. You could just use your iPhone, household light bulbs, things that you already have. So please stay inside and stay safe. I'm so excited to bring you along for this journey. So let's get started.