Chapter 6 · Light, colour and the look
Part 1 · Before the camera
Light tells the audience where they are, what time it is, what to look at and how to feel, before anyone speaks. A model lights every frame whether you ask or not, and unasked it lights the way every generated image is lit: soft, even and from nowhere. This chapter teaches light and colour as craft, and how to brief them at finished grade: every source with its position, quality, colour temperature and effect; the fill named by the surface that causes it; one contrast ratio with its reason; a palette written as shares of named surfaces; and a finish in two layers, capture written in the prompt and delivery grain laid in post.
In this chapter
Why light is the argument of a commercial frame, and how to judge it
One source written whole; the fill as the surface that causes it; one contrast ratio with its reason
Colour temperature as a named source; two light worlds on skin; a light event that tells the story
The palette as proportions, written as named surfaces; the finish in two layers
Reading a reference for its light, and briefing a look in words
Before you start. Chapter 2 explains how a model reads words, and Chapter 5 built the camera of the repair yard that this chapter lights. Chapter 9 puts the three elements taught here (light, atmosphere, finish) into a finished still; Chapter 10 changes the light of a frame you have already approved; Chapter 30 lays the delivery grain. Chapter 7 dresses the world the light falls on.
6.1 Light is the argument
On a high-budget commercial, lighting is language, not exposure: it tells the viewer whether the brand's world is tactile, aspirational, dangerous, luscious, documentary, satirical or ecstatic. Three films show the range. On Channel 4's Super. Human., Rina Yang and Bradford Young, both known for moody images, deliberately avoided going "too moody or dark" and gave the dream-like sport and the everyday scenes different light. On The Long Goodbye, Stuart Bentley lit mostly with windows and practicals, in mixed colour temperatures, to keep the world documentary and tactile. On Burberry's Open Spaces, Justin Brown worked mostly with natural light, and added large sources and edge light only where a body needed separating from the landscape.
Word | In this book |
Source | the thing in the world that makes a light: a bulb, a window, the sun, headlights, a screen |
Key, fill | the main light on a face; the light that lifts its shadow side, here always given a cause |
Motivated, practical | lit by a source the scene can explain; a light that is part of the set (a bulb, a lamp, a screen) |
Hard, soft | the quality of a source: a small or distant one makes sharp-edged shadows, a large or close one gradual ones |
Kelvin (K) | the number that names a light's colour: low is warm and orange, high is cool and blue. Always a cue for the look, written beside its visible result |
Contrast ratio | how much brighter the lit side of a face is than the shadow side (2:1, 4:1) |
Roll-off, clip | how light fades across a curved surface such as a cheek; a highlight so bright it keeps no detail |
Halation, finish | a soft glow round bright highlights, from light scattering inside the film; how the frame looks as captured: grain, base tone, bloom, lens edge |
A model's default light has a recognisable signature, and the rubric for judging light describes it plainly.
Light | What it looks like |
Weak | an all-round soft "AI glow": no source, no direction to the shadows, skin with no highlight |
Acceptable | motivated, but flat |
Aspirational | the light carries the story's change: in Coinbase's Your Way Out, hard light arrives with reality; in Volvo's The Epic Split, dawn is the only light |
The test | point to the key light's source in any frame; check that the shadows agree across the cut |
Light every frame by its cause. If you cannot point to what lights a face, neither can the model, and it will fill the gap with its default glow or with a second light it invents.
The decision matters more with a model than on a set, because the light is decided where the pixels are made. In image-to-video the approved source frame owns composition, appearance and identity, and its light drifts unless the prompt protects it. So the light is decided once, in the still, and the motion prompt's job is to keep it (6.4).
At finished grade the light settles six things. Write both words and numbers, each number beside the visible result it should give, never as physics and never alone.
You settle | You write | The visible result it sits beside |
Each source | what it is, as an object or a place in the world: a bulb, a window, the sun, headlights, never studio equipment | where the light comes from |
Its position and quality | where it is relative to the camera; hard or soft | the shadow's edge and length |
Its colour temperature | "at approximately 3200K" | how skin and whites read |
Its effect on a named surface | "rims her arm and cheek"; "a pool on the oilcloth" | the bright and the dark planes of the frame |
The fill | the surface that causes it | what the shadow side keeps |
One contrast ratio | with its reason | what the far cheek keeps and loses |
The phrases in the second column are illustrations written for this book. At test grade, words alone are enough ("a low warm bulb, soft"); the test grade proves a route and never models a finished frame. OpenAI's image-prompting guide asks writers to "name materials, lighting, colors, and the visual medium" (read 30 Sep 2026), and asks a photographic prompt to feel "honest and unposed, with real skin texture, worn materials, and everyday detail".
6.2 Sources: one cause for each effect
Write each source whole, in one sentence. What it is, where it is relative to the camera, hard or soft, its colour temperature, and what it does to a named surface (Figure 6.1). The sentence gives the model a source to draw, a side for the shadows and a colour for the skin. A source written by half ("warm light from the left") leaves the rest to the default glow. After the sources come the two things the sentence still owes: the fill's cause and one ratio with its reason (6.3).
Figure 6.1 — One source written whole. The five chips are the sun of the yard in Chapter 5, written for this book; the fill and the ratio are owed after it.
Give each face one motivated source, say where its shadow falls, and name the fill by its physical cause. The model builds believable light from a cause, and invents a second key when the fill is unexplained. For the yard: "The afternoon sun comes through the yard gate at camera left, hard-edged, at approximately 5600K, and lays a bright wedge across the concrete and the open palm; the pale concrete bounces a warm fill up under Fathy's chin; the taxi's underside falls to black." Three causes, one sentence, no invented lamp. A stylised look may own an unmotivated light on purpose, a fashion film's rim or a graphic product world; declare the exception in the shot record so that it is a decision and not an accident.
Treat practicals as objects first and light second. "A bulb in a small shade hanging low" gives the model something to draw and a place for the light to come from. The object makes the light believable; the light makes the object necessary.
Give the colour of each source as a Kelvin figure with its look beside it. These are illustrations written for this book and cues for the look you want, never measurements.
The source | The figure | What to put beside it |
Household bulb | approximately 2700K | "skin amber, whites go cream" |
Fluorescent strips | approximately 5000K | "flat and faintly green, every face lit evenly" |
Sun or window daylight | approximately 5600K | "neutral on skin, cool in the shadows" |
Flat overcast sky | approximately 6500K | "from above, no dramatic shadows" |
A phone or laptop screen | neutral white | "grey-white on skin, faintly cool at most, never blue" |
Name the fill by the surface that causes it. A fill that is only a word ("soft fill") is a source the model must invent; a fill that is a surface ("its own bounce from the pale wall") is a cause it can draw. A room with two sources only can make the second one the first's bounce: "the sky before sunrise through the shutters at approximately 4200K as the key, and its own bounce from the pale wall as fill", which closes the door on a second key.
Let the air show the light. A beam is visible only where something hangs in it: dust, steam, haze, the breath of a cold room. Write particles only where a source can light them, and say where they stop.
Translate the classic set-up into causes. A face is shaped by a key, a fill and a light behind that separates it from the background; each still needs to exist in a generated frame, and each needs a reason. Write "rim light" and the model draws a halo; write "a thin warm slit of street light along one edge of the shutter and a dim glow on his shoulder" and it draws an edge with a cause. Then say what the rest of the room does, because a model invents the ambient level if you do not, usually too bright and too even: "the rest of the room falls to warm dark", "the wall behind her keeps a trace of its tile line". The dark is part of the design.
Describe what a light does, never the equipment. Name a source by its role in the world, not by studio equipment: a softbox or a bounce card named in a prompt can turn up in the picture, so check the returned frame. There is no softbox in a repair yard.
Not: "large softbox camera left, bounce card below."
But: "hard sun from the gate at camera left; the shadow under the bottle is short and sharp; the pale concrete lifts the underside of his chin."
Choose each source for what it says about the story. A golden-hour glow would have made the yard about beauty; hard white sun at four in the afternoon makes it about heat, and heat is what the drink answers. Every source in the plan should be able to say what it is for.
Light a downcast face from below by its cause, never with a second key. Under a top light the eyes fall into their sockets, and the pale surface under the face is the fill. For the yard's shot 3, Fathy's eyes go down to the spanner and then the bottle: the sunlit concrete is the under-bounce, and the camera sits 30 centimetres off the ground so the eyes still read. When the eyes must read, lower the camera a little rather than the light. A period film may let them sink on purpose; if so, write the deep shadow in the sockets and under the chin, so that it is a decision.
Keep three recipes away from speaking shots. A single hard rim in the dark leaves the mouth unlit; a Rembrandt key (the classic portrait light that leaves a small triangle on the shadow cheek) can hide a corner of the lips; firelight flickering on a face is a stability risk, so test it first. Chapter 22 gives the plate rule for lip sync: the mouth visible and lit.
6.3 Contrast and exposure
Give one contrast ratio, with its reason and its visible consequence. Written bare ("near 4:1"), a ratio is a target the model cannot see. Written beside what the far cheek keeps, it is a cue for the look that you can check on the returned frame, and the reason in your record says why this frame sits at 4:1 and not at 2:1. The ratio is a planning value; the prompt carries what you would see.
You plan | You write | The reason it usually serves |
2:1 | "the far side of her face is only a little darker; every feature reads" | both faces must read, or the scene is plain on purpose |
4:1 | "the far cheek keeps its shape but loses its texture; the near eye is the brighter one" | a hero frame where the light must model the face |
8:1 | "the far side is an edge; only the near cheek carries detail" | a single hard source or a flash, an extreme that has to be earned |
Choose the ratio by what the scene means. Ratios are rules of thumb, not law. Premium lifestyle, beauty and broad comedy often live between 2:1 and 4:1, because legibility and polish matter; prestige drama and issue-led work often sit between 4:1 and 8:1, where contrast carries authority; beyond that the image becomes an aesthetic statement in itself and has to be earned. A dialogue two-shot wants its reason on the page: "near 3:1, because both faces carry the dialogue and both must read". The yard's shot 3 sits near 3:1: Fathy's face is in open shade, the sky fills it and the warm concrete lifts his chin, so his eyes read while the bottle, backlit by the sun, is the brightest thing in the frame.
Expose for the skin first. More important than the ratio is where the highlight sits on skin. Expose for the roll-off you need on the face, then build depth and separation round it. Overfilling darker skin to "see more" flattens it and destroys its dimension.
State the exposure intent as what keeps its texture and what may clip. "Her forehead keeps its texture; the bulb may clip." That is a result you can check, where a stop value alone decides nothing; a value in stops may sit beside such a consequence, like any other number, and never replaces it. The yard's intent for shot 2: the palm keeps every crease of oil, the bottle's backlit highlights may clip, and the taxi's underside may go to black and keep nothing.
6.4 Colour temperature, and two light worlds
Write colour temperature as a named source, its Kelvin and how skin reads. "Cool" invites a blue cast; a source's own colour does not. Write "the neutral white light of a laptop video call", not "the cool blue glow of the laptop screen", and skin stays honest.
Keep two light worlds on skin, not on the walls. No teal in the shadows, no orange pushed into the highlights. Imported warm-against-teal reads as generic and makes a real place look borrowed. Let the difference between two sources live on the faces, where it means something.
Written for this book · Telecom and tech · Nano Banana Pro, 16:9, text only · passage: element 9 (light) of a hero still, a face between two light worlds · not run
Example 6.1 — a phone and a wall lantern on one face
A father sits on a Jeddah balcony at dusk. Two lights meet on his face and nowhere else. His phone, held at chest height, is the fill: a neutral white, grey-white on his skin, faintly cool at most and never blue. A household bulb in a wall lantern behind camera left, soft, at approximately 2700K, is the key: it turns his near cheek and the collar of his thobe amber. Contrast sits near 4:1, so the screen's edge still models his jaw, and the far cheek keeps its shape and loses its texture. The wall behind him stays the same warm cream in both lights. The screen's reflection in his eyes is a small hard rectangle. No teal in the shadows, no orange pushed into the highlights.Why it works
Each source is an object with a place, a quality and a colour, and each says what it does to a named surface: the near cheek, the collar, the jaw.
The two worlds are kept on skin and the wall is told to stay one colour, which is what stops a teal-and-orange split.
The ratio comes with its reason and what the far cheek keeps.
The screen's colour is written as a behaviour on skin ("never blue"), the fix for "cool".
Let the story's turn be a light event that behaviour causes. In the yard the turn is carried by light, not by a camera move or a grade. In the last shot Karim rolls out of the taxi's shade on his creeper and his face crosses into hard sun; the camera rises with him, but nothing in the camera or the grade does the work. A first step that stops halfway, one cheek in the sun and one in the shade, is truer than a jump, because a man still half under the car should be half in its dark (Figure 6.2).
Figure 6.2 — The light event of shot 6: two steps of arrival, both caused by what Karim does. The camera rises and the grade does not help.
Treat each shot's light state as continuity. A light event creates states that the neighbouring shots must honour, exactly as a prop's position does. Shot 5 ends with the sun full on the palm; shot 6 begins with Karim's face in shade, so the light state at entry and exit goes in the shot table beside the positions (Chapter 5), and is checked across every cut. If the crossing will not generate cleanly, the fallback is to let his face arrive already in mixed light and give the whole event to the squint.
In a clip, the frame owns the light: protect it, or give it one event. In ordinary image-to-video the approved source frame owns composition, appearance and identity; the motion prompt names what to preserve and adds only motion, timing, physics and endpoint. It does not rebuild the light and does not paste in a mood. Unnamed light can drift: a window, a second key or a blue cast arrives. Say that the light holds, or write one light event carried by movement (illustrations written for this book):
The light holds: "The hard sun stays on his palm, and the taxi's underside stays black."
One event: "As the creeper rolls, his face crosses out of the taxi's shade into the hard sun, and he squints."
6.5 Palette, brand colour and the grade
Plan the palette as proportions; write it as shares of named surfaces. Many directors plan colour as a 60/30/10 split: about 60 per cent of the frame in a dominant colour, 30 in a secondary one, 10 in an accent. Keep the split in the shot record as a planning tool. It is a planning tool; what carries colour in a prompt is a named surface. Write the split as proportions in words, each on a surface a camera can see: the largest field, the second, the one small accent.
Typed as a formula | Written as named surfaces (for the yard) |
"a 60/30/10 balance of white, navy and amber" | the chalk white of the taxi and the bleached concrete is the largest field; the oil-black shade under the car and Karim's navy overalls are the second; the amber of the bottle is the one small accent |
Take the palette from the world's materials. Whitewashed brick, faded plastic, oil-dark concrete, tea amber. A palette built outwards from the place looks lived in; one imposed from outside, a teal-and-orange grade laid on a Cairo yard, makes a real place look imported.
Decide the grade as a relationship, not a filter. The yard's grade has one job: keep the bottle's amber and Karim's skin true in sun and in shade, and leave the rest alone. Light is decided in the still; the grade is a separate decision made on top of it, and keeping the two apart lets you change one without the other.
Give every frame a colour hierarchy. The shot table names three things: the dominant colour, the secondary colour that contrasts with it, and the brand or product colour that must be protected. The protected colour is the one the grade may never move. If a generated product drifts, replace the mark in post from the packaging artwork and grade the composite to match the plate, not the plate to match the composite (Chapter 10).
In monochrome, replace the palette with a tonal instruction. A black-and-white frame has no colours to place; it has tones. Write which named surface is darkest, which brightest and how the tones between fall: "the wet stone silver where it catches light, black where it does not".
6.6 The finish, in two layers
The finish is the last element before the closing line, and it is a technical close: it says how the frame was captured, never how it should feel. It is written in two layers.
Layer one: capture, described in the prompt. Write the finish as the behaviour of the photograph, part by part. The right-hand column is illustration written for this book.
The part | Written as behaviour |
Stock or sensor character | "clean modern digital capture", or "a fine-grained daylight stock" |
Grain by tonal zone | "fine grain, finer in the highlights and slightly stronger in the mid-tones" |
Base tone | "a neutral base tone", or "a faint warm base tone" |
Where highlights bloom | "a soft bloom where the window's edge meets the tile" |
Lens character at the edge | "slight softness at the edges of the frame, sharp at the centre" |
What stays sharp, what dissolves | "her eyes and the label edge sharp; the tile behind softens" |
Tone on named surfaces (monochrome) | "the wet stone silver where it catches light, black where it does not" |
Keep the grain fine and restrained, a property of the photograph. Never ask the model to age or damage the image ("fake old film"): it invents the damage, and it invents it differently in every frame. Name a stock only if its name implies a visible behaviour, such as a daylight balance, reduced grain or a red halation; otherwise it is a brand sticker, and quality words ("8K", "masterpiece") describe nothing. Check the name against the era and against what the stock did.
Layer two: delivery grain, laid in post. The grain and halation the audience finally sees are a second layer: laid once, last, in post, at final resolution, and matched across every shot and graphic (Chapter 30). One decision goes in the shot record at the start: the project says which layer owns halation. If the capture layer writes a bloom, post adds less; if post owns halation, the prompt leaves the bloom out. Any named film emulation, noise-reduction pass or upscaler is an unverified transformation until a representative frame has been judged.
The finish is always present and always project-defined. A period film asks for the behaviour of a period stock; a contemporary beauty spot asks for clean capture with restrained grain. What belongs to one project (a black-and-white tonal clause, a period lens softness, a restored-print finish) is not a rule for the next; the habit of always writing a finish block carries to all. Chapter 35 shows a black-and-white finish written as behaviour.
Decide the texture once, for the film. A fine, even grain can bind separately generated plates into one negative; halation is wanted or it is not, and it is written once.
Add friction to a clean image. Top cinematographers resist perfect digital clarity even on large productions: Greig Fraser talks about "dirtying" a clean large-format image with specialty glass; Rina Yang chose characterful lenses over neutral modern glass on Super. Human.; Justin Brown shot Open Spaces on a fast film pushed one stop to pull more texture into the midtones and highlights. A generated image arrives clean unless you decide otherwise. Decide where the friction comes from (grain, a softness at the edges, a highlight that blooms) and write it as what the image does, or add it in finishing. Grain is not noise: film grain is the random texture of silver particles, coarse on fast stocks and fine on slow ones, where digital noise and pixelation are blocky and stepped.
The whole closing of a prompt, from the light to the last line, is Example 6.2.
Written for this book · Beauty and personal care · Nano Banana Pro, 16:9, text only · passage: elements 9 to 12 (light, atmosphere, finish, exclusions and closing line) of a hero still · not run
Example 6.2 — a window, a tile wall and a finish that describes capture
Morning window light from camera left, soft through a frosted pane, at approximately 5600K, rims her cheekbone and the shoulder of the glass dropper bottle in her hand. The white tile wall at camera right is the fill, bouncing the window back so the shadow side of her face keeps its shape; contrast sits near 3:1 because skin and product must both read, and the far cheek keeps its pores and loses only its brightness. Her forehead keeps its texture; the glass highlight on the bottle may clip. A little steam hangs in the window's beam and nowhere else. The white of the tile is the largest field, her warm skin and dark wet hair the second, and the amber of the oil in the bottle the one small accent. Clean modern digital capture with fine, restrained grain, finer in the highlights and slightly stronger in the mid-tones, a neutral base tone, a soft bloom where the window's edge meets the tile, sharp lens edges; her eyes and the bottle's label edge are the sharpest things in the frame while the tile behind softens. No plastic skin, no second window, no teal in the shadows, no beauty-filter smoothing, no overlaid text, subtitles, logos, or interface graphics.Why it works
The window is written whole and the fill is a surface, so no second key appears; the ratio carries its reason and what the far cheek keeps.
The exposure intent names what keeps texture and what may clip; the palette is three shares of named surfaces, and the protected colour is the amber.
The finish is capture behaviour by part; the grain is fine and restrained and nothing asks for an old-film look. The delivery grain and any further halation are laid in post (Chapter 30).
Four exclusions, none of them quality words, then the closing line.
6.7 Reading a reference for its light
Chapter 4 teaches how to gather references for a treatment. This section reads one for what matters to the look: its light, its colour and its finish.
Separate the dimensions before you borrow anything. A reference has many: concept, camera, lighting, editing, sound, performance, art direction, colour, finishing, cultural truth and realism. For a look, three matter most: the lighting (the physics of the light, separate from what it lights), the colour (the grade applied over it), and the finish (grain, halation, flares, the texture of the medium). Art direction can be lifted separately (Chapter 7), and so can the camera (Chapter 5).
Read the light like a detective. Cinematographers reverse-engineer a frame this way.
The catchlight. The eye is a curved mirror of the set. A large, soft-edged rectangle means a large soft source close to the face; a small, sharp point means a hard, distant one, such as the sun. Analysts of Blade Runner read the red glows and white highlights in the actors' eyes as light sent along the lens axis by a tilted transparent mirror, a technique popular in 1980s commercials and features.
The shadow. Trace its edge back to its object to find the key's height and side. A hard edge means a small or distant source; a soft edge, a large or close one.
The fall-off. Light from a close source dies quickly across a short distance (one arm much darker than the other); light from a distant source stays even across deep space.
The fill. How much detail the shadow side keeps tells you whether the ambient light was raised by bouncing large soft sources, or taken away with negative fill (a dark surface that takes light from the shadow side) for contrast. A key placed on the far side of the face from the camera, a reverse key, gives the depth many premium images share.
The colour. The time of day is in the temperatures: early morning has cool ambient light and a low warm sun; an artificial urban night is dominated by sodium orange or mercury green. Write each source's temperature as a Kelvin figure beside how it reads on skin (6.4).
Figure 6.3 — Read a reference for its clues, then write the light they imply as a cause and its effects.
Interrogate a frame that has lost its context. For a single image with no title, no crew and no camera data, ask five questions. Where does the off-screen light come from: a window's soft wrap, a lamp, the sun's hard edge? What depth lies behind the frame, judging by how blurred the background is? What time is it, judging by the colour of the ambient light? How was the camera supported: a level, still horizon suggests a tripod or a dolly, a slight skew a hand? And why did the director put the camera there, and does that suit your project?
6.8 Building a look, and briefing it in words
Take the logic, not the surface. Lean too hard on one reference and you get imitation. Extract the decisions that make an image work and combine them into something that did not exist before.
Borrow one dimension from each reference, and say what you leave. No single reference should give more than one dominant dimension of the result: if one gives the light, it does not also give the production design. Name one reference as the anchor and the others as accents, and for each write what you borrow and what you avoid.
Reference | Borrow | Avoid |
a gritty independent short | naturalistic ambient light, coarse grain, muted design | its wardrobe, its urban decay, its actors, its melancholy |
an award-winning car commercial | high-contrast reflections, an overhead soft source, central symmetry | cars, asphalt, metal, motion blur |
Reach far apart: the light of a car commercial with the colour of a 1970s thriller gives a signature that neither source has. Let one reference supply the structure and one or two others the light and the texture; a clear hierarchy keeps the image coherent. And for every reference, name what the model must not take from it: its people, its objects, its setting. When a reference goes in as a picture, fence it: "take only its tonal range, contrast and grain; take nothing of its people, room, objects or framing" (Chapter 10).
The look brief is the model's lighting diagram. On a conventional job a curated lookbook lets the cinematographer draw the lighting set-ups before the technical scout. With a model as the camera the look brief does the same job for a crew that reads only words: it must be complete enough that the light could be built from it.
Brief the look in words drawn from the world. Write each borrowed decision as a sentence about sources, surfaces and what the stock does, for three reasons: words drawn from the world bring only what you name, where a style picture brings its content along; a JSON block gives a model no schema to read, and field names are just text (Chapter 2); and a stock or lens name helps only when it implies a visible behaviour, so write the behaviour (6.6). "Beautiful", "epic", "cinematic", "gorgeous" and "stunning" are outcomes, not decisions. Translate each into the source, the surface and the colour it stands for.
Put the look in the still, once. Because the frame owns the light (6.4), the look is made in the stills and protected in the clips: the motion prompt says the light holds, or names one event. A mood paragraph pasted into every clip adds nothing and gives the model a second place to contradict the still. If words miss twice, add one style picture, fenced so that it gives only its tonal range, contrast and grain.
Template: the light element of a finished still (written for this book; not run). It follows the shape of Examples 6.1 and 6.2.
[Source 1: what it is, where it is relative to the camera, hard or soft] at approximately [Kelvin]K [what it does to a named surface]; [source 2, the same five things, if the scene has one]; [what falls to dark, against a landmark]. [The fill: the surface that causes it], which is why [the feature it keeps readable]; contrast near [ratio]:1, [its reason], so the far cheek [what it keeps and what it loses]. [What keeps its texture]; [what may clip].6.9 Which tool for which job
Each tool reads light words in its own dialect. This chapter gives the craft; the sections below give the words.
The job | Where to look |
Light, atmosphere and finish in a still, and how the tool treats a Kelvin figure and a ratio | 11.3 (Nano Banana Pro); 12.3 (GPT Image 2.5) |
Keeping the light of a start frame, or giving it one event | 16.3 (Kling); 17.3 (Seedance 2.5); 18.3 (Wan 3.0); 19.3 (Veo 3.1, MiniMax H3) |
Changing the light of an approved frame | |
A lit mouth on the plate for lip sync | Chapter 22; 24.3 (Sync Lipsync 3) |
Where the delivery grain and halation are laid |
6.10 The checks, the gate and the records
Before you sign the light of a frame
You can point to the source of every face's light, and the shadows agree with it.
Every source is written whole: what it is, where, hard or soft, its Kelvin, what it does to a named surface. No equipment appears in the frame.
The fill is a surface you can point to; no light appears that has no cause.
The far cheek shows the ratio you wrote, and the record says why.
Skin keeps its texture where the brief said it would; only what may clip, clips.
Each source reads in its own colour on skin; no blue cast, no teal in the shadows, no orange wash.
The palette reads as shares of named surfaces; the protected colour reads as it does on the product.
Downcast eyes are readable; a speaking mouth is lit.
The finish describes capture, with the grain kept fine, and nothing asks for "old film"; the delivery texture is decided once for the film.
The light matches the neighbouring shots across the cut.
A frame whose light passes this list goes to the acceptance gate (Chapter 9); a look brief is complete when each line of it is one the list can check. This stage writes into the records: in the shot record, the look brief (each source and its reason, the fill's cause, the ratio and its reason, the exposure intent, the palette and its protected colour, the finish and which layer owns halation, one exclusion against a failure you expect, and for each reference the one dimension borrowed); in the shot table, the light state at each shot's entry and exit; and in the project's decisions, the delivery texture, decided once.
Open questions
How each tool reads a Kelvin figure, as a colour, as a cue for warmth or not at all, is not yet known; the rule rests on craft and finished practice, with a visible result beside every figure. In a black-and-white frame what a Kelvin figure does is also not yet known. Check the first returned frame.
Ratios by register are rules of thumb from published films, not a measured method.
Whether a prompted capture finish and a delivery grain laid in post interact well has not been tested; judge a representative frame before the look is locked.
What to remember
Light is the argument of a commercial frame; judge it by whether you can point to its source.
Write each source whole: what it is, where, hard or soft, its Kelvin, what it does to a named surface. Practicals are objects first.
Name the fill by the surface that causes it; describe what a light does, never the equipment.
Give one contrast ratio with its reason and its visible consequence; expose for the skin first.
Write words and numbers together, each beside its result: a cue for the look, never physics, never alone. At test grade, words are enough.
Keep two light worlds on skin, not on the walls. Let the story's turn be a light event caused by behaviour; in a clip the frame owns the light, so it holds or makes one event.
Plan the palette as proportions if you like; write it as named surfaces, never as the string. In monochrome write a tonal instruction.
Write the finish in the prompt as capture behaviour, grain kept fine; lay the delivery grain and halation once, last, in post.
Read references for their light, colour and finish separately; borrow one dimension from each; make the look in the still, once, in words.
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