Practical Lighting in Film: 8 Famous Examples, Explained

In Barry Lyndon, the candles on the table are the lights. Stanley Kubrick shot those scenes with nothing else, on a lens built for NASA. That’s practical lighting at its purest: a light source the audience can see in the shot, doing real work on the scene. The 8 practical lighting examples below count down by how much of the scene the practicals actually light, from a string of Christmas lights to a room lit by nothing but candles.

What Is Practical Lighting?

Practical lighting is any light source that’s visible in the frame and works for real: a desk lamp that’s switched on, a TV that’s playing, a candle that’s burning. On set, these are called practicals, or practical lights.

The name comes from props. A practical prop is one that actually works, like a tap that runs or a radio that plays. A practical light is a lamp that actually lights up.

Practicals do two jobs. They tell the audience where the light in a room comes from, and they add depth, because a glowing lamp in the background pulls the eye through the frame. Sometimes they do a third job and light the actors too. That’s where it gets interesting.

Practical vs Motivated Lighting

Practical lighting is a source you can see. Motivated lighting is a film light you can’t see, placed so it looks like it comes from a source in the story.

	Practical lighting	Motivated lighting
Where the light is	In the shot	Off camera
What it is	A lamp, candle, screen or sign in the scene	A film light matched to a source in the story
Example	The candles on the table in Barry Lyndon	A light outside a window standing in for the sun
Main job	Sets the look and the direction of the light	Does the heavy lifting on the actors

The two usually work together. A practical lamp shows the audience where the light should come from, and a motivated light off camera does the work the lamp can’t. Every practical is motivated. Not every motivated light is a practical.

8 Practical Lighting Examples in Film and TV

These eight practical lighting examples count down to the scenes lit by practicals alone. Each one names the practical, how it was used, and one thing you can steal for your own film.

8) Stranger Things (2016)

Stranger Things turned a string of Christmas lights into a way for a mother to talk to her missing son.

Joyce starts with a tangle of Christmas lights for yes and no questions. Then she paints the alphabet on the wall and hangs a bulb over each letter, and Will spells out “R-I-G-H-T H-E-R-E” and then “R-U-N.”

The Duffer Brothers first planned to use the lights for the kids to track the monster. One of the show’s writers suggested Joyce use them to talk to Will instead. It became one of the most famous uses of a practical light in TV, and one you can copy for a few dollars.

7) Joker (2019)

Joker put the lights inside a subway car on a dimmer board, so the cinematographer could kill them at the moment of violence.

The crew brought a real subway car onto a stage and surrounded it with LED panels showing the tunnel going past. “We did this so I had full control over both the lights inside the train, as well as all the lighting that came outside the train,” Sher told /Film.

So when Arthur is attacked, the car’s lights go out, and hot flashes of colour from outside cut across the dark. It feels like a real train breaking down. It was a plan, run live from a control board.

6) Nightcrawler (2014)

Nightcrawler let the street lights of Los Angeles light the background, and lit only the actors.

Elswit had no budget for big night exterior setups. So the team chose locations where the practicals were already doing the work. Elswit told American Cinematographer he looked for places where he could add to what was already in the background and light only the foreground.

Most of the film was lit under 10 foot-candles, according to gaffer Michael Bauman. That’s dim enough for the city behind Lou to stay bright and busy while he sits in the dark of his car.

5) Collateral (2004)

Collateral hid about 30 thin light panels inside a taxi, so the cab itself lights Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx.

The panels are flexible plastic sheets that glow, like the backlight on an Indiglo watch. The crew rigged about 30 of them per cab and wired them to a dimmer that could drop to nearly 20% without changing colour. Mann first wanted it warm, and they settled on “a slightly cool green that looked very natural.”

Outside the cab, Mann set a rule for night Los Angeles: “Make the fill light the key light.” The street lights did the rest. It’s one of the first big studio films shot mostly on digital cameras, and they could see into the dark of the city in a way film couldn’t.

4) Ex Machina (2014)

Ex Machina built its lights into the walls and ceilings of the set, and switched them to red when the power fails.

Hardy wanted tungsten, not fluorescent tubes. “I had my gaffer Lee Walters spend two weeks fixing all three sets with these battens with 40-watt tungsten bulbs on them that we could control,” he told Filmmaker Magazine.

The red lights sit in the same battens. When Ava triggers a power cut, the house turns red, and Hardy said the red can mean danger or be “almost absurd, as in when Nathan descends into his disco dance.” Everything ran to one dimmer board, so he could change the light in any direction in seconds.

3) Skyfall (2012)

Skyfall lit its Shanghai fight with a glowing billboard of jellyfish, and left Bond and Patrice as silhouettes.

The two men fight on an empty floor at night. Behind them, LED panels show giant, glowing jellyfish. The screen is the light. Nobody lights their faces, so all you see is the outline of the fight against the moving image.

Mendes shot it in a stylised way with very little cutting, using a slow push-in on the silhouettes, according to /Film. Deakins earned an Oscar nomination for the film. It’s proof that a practical doesn’t need to be subtle. Sometimes it’s the whole frame.

2) The Witch (2015)

The Witch lights its farmhouse at night with candles, because that’s what a family in 1630s New England had.

“Well, they have candles so let’s use candles,” Blaschke told Variety. “You’re not worried about how to make something try to look like something else. You’re just going for the real thing.”

The catch is that candles burn down and have to be replaced between takes. Eggers wanted even fewer of them lit than Blaschke did. Historians told the crew that a poor family of the period wouldn’t burn many candles at once, so the darkness in the corners of the room is historically correct as well as frightening.

1) Barry Lyndon (1975)

Barry Lyndon is the most famous example of practical lighting in film, because its night interiors are lit by candles and nothing else.

Kubrick wanted to show 18th-century rooms at night as they really were. According to the American Society of Cinematographers, he felt “the addition of any fill light would have added an artificiality.” So the crew hung metal reflectors above the chandeliers to push the light down, and that was it.

The light was so low that the key measured about three foot-candles. Standard lenses couldn’t cope, so Kubrick got hold of three Zeiss f/0.7 lenses built for NASA, and the whole film was push-processed one stop. Fifty years later, it still looks like an oil painting.

How to Light a Scene With Practicals

You can light a scene with practicals using the lamps you already own. Here’s how to make them camera ready.

Swap the Bulbs

Household bulbs are usually warm, around 2700K. That’s fine if you set your camera to match, or want a warm look. For clean skin tones, use bulbs with a high CRI, 95 or above, and make sure every bulb in the room has the same colour temperature. Rosco colour gels can fix the ones that don’t match.

Put Every Practical on a Dimmer

A practical that’s too bright blows out on camera, and the lampshade turns into a white blob. A dimmer lets you bring each lamp down until the shade holds some detail. Tungsten bulbs warm up as they dim. Many LED bulbs don’t dim smoothly, so test them first.

Expose for the Practical

Set your exposure so the brightest part of the practical keeps detail. Use your camera’s zebras or false colour if it has them. Then decide how much light the actor needs from other sources. The exposure triangle explains how ISO, aperture and shutter trade off when the room gets dark.

Hide the Help

A lamp on a side table won’t light a face across the room. Add a small, soft light off camera that comes from the same direction as the practical and matches its colour. That’s motivated lighting. It’s usually your key light, and it’s the same logic as the key in a three-point lighting setup. Bouncing it off a wall or ceiling keeps it soft, as in our guide to bounce lighting.

Watch for Flicker

Some LEDs and fluorescent tubes flicker on camera, even when they look steady to your eye. Shoot at 1/50 of a second where the power is 50Hz, and 1/60 where it’s 60Hz. Always check a test clip before the take.

Place Practicals in Depth

Put one practical in the foreground and one or two deeper in the frame. The eye travels from one to the next, and a flat room suddenly has space. It works well in low key lighting, where a lamp in the background stops the dark from turning into a flat black.

Common Practical Lighting Mistakes

• The blown-out lampshade. If the shade is pure white on your monitor, dim it or put a lower wattage bulb in.
• Light from nowhere. If the actor is brightly lit and the only lamp is behind them, the audience feels it. Match your hidden light to the practical.
• Mixed colours by accident. A warm lamp next to a cool LED looks like a mistake unless you meant it.
• Every lamp in the house. Two or three practicals in frame usually look better than six.
• Flicker you didn’t check for. It shows up in the edit, when it’s too late to fix.

For more on shaping light from any source, see our guide to hard lighting vs soft lighting and our full film lighting guide for beginners.

FAQs About Practical Lighting

The Final Cut on Practical Lighting

Practical lighting is the light the audience can see. Sometimes it’s a clue, sometimes it’s the whole plan, and it’s the cheapest way to make a scene feel like a real place.

Tonight, switch off your ceiling light and light one scene with the lamps you already own. Put them on dimmers, move one into the background, and see how far they get you. Which lamp in your house is going to be your first practical?