Melanin Cinematography | Lighting

Introduction

It propels the food chain, giving us life; it creates atmosphere, shaping our mood and affecting how we feel. We harness it to create experiences that allow us to curate time and space. We also harness it to influence how we curate character to an audience. That is the power of light, one of the most essential sources to the human experience in the universe with the sun being the biggest source of light on earth. Without light, there is no cinematography.

For decades Hollywood has struggled with representation in cultural diversity but even when they did become inclusive in casting darker skin characters, dignity became a major issue because they weren’t lighting darker skin to be aesthetically pleasing which ultimately affects how we might perceive our characters in a negative way.

In the previous article, we discussed the biology of the skin and it’s layers. In this article, we will be focusing on the most fundamental aspect of cinematography and that is light and it’s relation to the nature of darker skin. But before we go there let us first define light.
What is light?

Light

Scientifically speaking, light is part of a series of waves and rays that make up what is called the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum is made up of Radio waves, Microwaves, Infrared, Ultraviolet, X-ray, Gamma rays and a small portion of the segment that we call the visible light spectrum.
What is the visible light spectrum? The visible light spectrum is the only type of light that can be perceived by humans. We’re able to perceive this portion of the light spectrum because it exists between the wavelengths of 380 to 700 nanometers which falls within the range detectable to the human eye. The eye has cone-shaped cells that act as receivers that are calibrated to this narrow part of the spectrum so any electromagnetic radiation (light) that falls outside of the visible light spectrum is invisible to us.

In appearance Daylight (the sun) often appears to us as ‘white light’ and this is because the light is made up of an array of colours that when combined, gives them a white or clear appearance. Through an experiment conducted by Isaac Newton in 1665, we discovered that the visible light spectrum is made up of wavelengths that separate into the colours of the rainbow (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet) when they pass through a prism which causes each colour to refract at a different angle because of the varying wavelengths of each colour with Violet having the shortest length and Red having the longest. Through this, we also learned that by filtering this light we could essentially alter its colour temperature and affects its visual appearance to reflect any of the colours that already exist within its spectrum.

While we have a variety of light sources, lighting can generally be categorized according to its output which is either daylight (5500 Kelvin) or tungsten (3200 Kelvin) and both of these are classified according to the Colour Rendering Index (CRI) which measures a sources ability to reproduce colours of objects accurately to the human eye. The higher the CRI reading the more reliable a light source is in colour reproduction.
So now that we understand the basics of visible light, how do we begin to create aesthetically pleasing results for people with darker skin? We can begin by looking at Tungsten sources as the base for where we can begin laying the foundation for pleasing results.

Why tungsten?
Tungsten has a very high CRI reading that is close to 100 and whilst some say that tungsten lacks in blue, this actually works in favor of darker skin; because of the lack of saturation in dark skin due to its absorption of light to create melanin and because skin has a red hue (created by the dermis, which is the thick layer of tissue below the epidermis and it contains blood capillaries and nerve endings among other structures that are responsible for the red hue in our skin due to the hemoglobin that is found in the red blood cells that circulate in our veins.) circulating beneath its layers, when tungsten interacts with dark skin, it brings about a vibrancy to the desaturated appearance of the surface of the skin because of its warm appearance (3200K) and because skin exists within the warmer part of the spectrum (red-brown/yellow and black-brown) it increases the warmth of the skin creating a more pleasing result.

So now that we have a source that works in favor of dark skin as a base, the next step would be to create a strong diffused key. Why a diffused key? Because of the nature of darker skin requiring more light, if we just flood a strong source of direct light towards our character, because of the reflective nature of dark skin, we risk creating harsh specular hot spots that are hard to control and we end up with too much light falling onto the scene which becomes hard to control. So a strong diffused key would be the solution because it would produce a softer quality of light that wraps its self around the skin creating a finer transition from light to shadow and also eliminating harsh hot spots on the face.

There are a variety of different diffusion materials that we could use that would be up to personal taste with some diffusions being thicker than others and essentially suppressing large volumes of light from the key source but also creating a much softer quality of light that can result in a really beautiful roll off of light on the skin making it more evenly spread out and exposing more detail and features without overexposing our light.
Once we have our diffused key dialed in, we will need to establish specular lights or accents that counteract the matte nature of dark skin, essentially giving the skin more volume, shape, and visual contrast. These accents of light can be created with smaller and stronger light sources that can be used as edge lights adding to the reflectivity of the skin. We can even take this further by using different colour lights to edge our characters to create interesting colour contrast that makes the skin achieve maximum colour contrast and look aesthetically pleasing.

Whilst the nature of the topic on skin is generally subjective, this forms the basis or the guideline of where one can begin to create darker skin tones that look aesthetically pleasing.