For actors who suffer from turkey neck syndrome with wrinkles and skin flaps under the neck, butterfly lighting is very appropriate in shadowing these blemishes out. This is also the most effective key light angle in helping define and strengthen the jawbone and accent the cheekbone. The higher you position this light the narrower you’ll make a face appear, while the lower you go, the rounder the face.
Three-quarter front lighting is affectionately termed Rembrandt lighting after the master artist. The three-quarter front lighting angle casts a triangle shadow below the eye on the shadow side of the face.
The human eye perceives the world in a three-dimensional perspective. Movie cameras capture information in a two-dimensional perspective. Because Rembrandt lighting adds modeling perspective to faces, it is a great lighting angle to reinforce the illusion of capturing a three-dimensional subject onto a two-dimensional format.
Before the Renaissance and Baroque periods, paintings were flat, two-dimensional images on canvas. Then came along master painter Caravaggio who utilized side lighting in his work and influenced an entire movement known as chiaroscuro—the Italian word for ‘light and shade’—whereby a face is framed half lit, half shadowed. Caravaggio hired actors to play the parts of the people represented in his paintings. He controlled and placed actors in specific lighting setups to formulate interplays of light against dark, in order to create contrast and separation. By extrapolation of his enormous influence on the art of lighting, I affectionately consider Caravaggio to be cinema’s first cinematographer.
Side lighting gives you the greatest amount of contrast and is most appropriate for a dramatic look. The angle of the light exacerbates wrinkles, imperfections and surface texture. The use of half light/half shadow on an actor’s face is an interesting technique to juxtapose the internal conflict of an actor’s good versus sinister side, through use of the metaphors light/dark, revelation/concealment.
