All through film school I noticed that people used these huge lights that took a ton of electricity (we tripped more than one circuit breaker in my day), made a set swelteringly hot, were potential fire hazards, scratched the floor, took forever to set up, and once you had your set lit like crazy, the camera operator would have to close the iris on the camera so not as much light would get in. Does that make sense? It sure didn't to me. Besides, their films often looked worse than mine.
Why spend all that effort lighting a set if you were just going to block all the light going in to the camera? And why bother if it looks better without the lights?
Well, it turns out that it's all in how you use the lights you have.
I am happy to tell people that I didn't use film lights for the first two years of my professional film career. If found that if I just placed two floor lamps without their shades on either side of my set just outside of camera range, I got decent looking shots. However, if the sun went behind a cloud, the set started to look pretty bad.
Finally I got an inexpensive set of lights used by digital photographers. These lights came with Soft Boxes and Barn Doors. The quality of my productions improved. Now I use lights whenever I have time and an outlet. I've lit sets with just one light, and sometimes I've used five.
So why did all my classmates make such bad looking movies with so many lights?
First, inexperience: They simply didn't know how to use them properly. This takes time and practice (and getting help sometimes). As a film student, of course you're not going to be good at lighting a set yet. That's why you're a student.
Second, focus: They believed that just having the lights would make their movies better, and didn't bother to learn how to use them. They should have spent their time on their story and other pre-production items rather than thinking hauling around thousands of dollars worth of equipment was going to make them "professional". Don't fall prey to the same idea.
Tip of the Month: If you are new to filmmaking, you do not need film lights. Use house lamps. If you are ready to buy lights, let us know so we can help.
