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  "path": "/light-spec-commercial",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-06T19:52:01.000Z",
  "site": "https://nofilmschool.com",
  "tags": [
    "Lighting",
    "Cinematography advice",
    "Product lighting",
    "Lighting advice",
    "Commercial lighting",
    "Commerical directing",
    "Cinematography",
    "Wandering DP",
    "www.youtube.com",
    "scripts",
    "making a kitchen look good is truly hard",
    "The DPs who pull off great location work obsessively scout for motivated light built into the space",
    "Avel Chuklanov",
    "Unsplash",
    "Backlighting separates your subject from the background",
    "Lighting multiple planes is how you get a cinematic image",
    "The way to do that in spec work is by going macro"
  ],
  "textContent": "\n\n\n\nWandering DP (Patrick O'Sullivan) recently reviewed a spec Nestle commercial submitted by a viewer. I really enjoy these videos because, much like reading other scripts and feeling what bumps, seeing a finished work and where it could be improved is extremely instructive.\n\nYou might not have a lot of interest in working in commercials or shooting food, but this is still helpful guidance to direct your eye to the errors made in the spot. The lessons apply to anything you might try to capture in a kitchen, a bar, or anywhere you've wedged a camera into a corner and hoped for the best.\n\nCheck out the video here.\n\n- YouTube www.youtube.com\n\n## First, Have a Goal\n\nWe just wrote about this as it applies to scripts, and the advice is similar here. Why are you doing the thing? What’s your goal?\n\nIs this spec meant to get you hired for food work specifically, or is it just a way to practice and pull a few strong frames? Those are different goals with different strategies.\n\nO'Sullivan is explicit that if food advertising is your target, know it's a specialist field with a high technical bar because making a kitchen look good is truly hard in ways that aren't obvious until you're already in trouble.\n\nBut practicing cinematography and chasing a few strong portfolio frames is equally valid. Just be honest about it before you start, because the goal changes everything you optimize for on the day.\n\n## Have You Already Lost in Pre-Production?\n\nWe mentioned how the camera here points into a corner of a kitchen with no real light sources. This is the central gut punch of the whole critique. This setup means there’s no path for backlight, nowhere for light to enter except from the same direction as the camera.\n\nAnd O'Sullivan is pretty blunt about how bad this is. There's almost no way to rescue that on the day.\n\n“We hosed ourselves well into pre-production when we decided, ‘Let's shoot in this kitchen and let's shoot this angle,’” he says.\n\nLocation angle is a lighting decision. A corner with walls on two sides and no windows means light has nowhere to go except straight at your subject—which also means no shape, no contrast, no depth. \n\nThe DPs who pull off great location work obsessively scout for motivated light built into the space before they commit to an angle. Look at where light enters a room before you set up.\n\nCredit: Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash\n\n## The Gospel of Backlight (and Layers)\n\nI was just on a shoot where we had a pretty decent option for a wide exterior shot with a car, and my DP realized it looked too commercial despite the visual interest in the frame. Commercial was not what we were going for. He came around to the other side and was immediately like, “Duh. It wasn’t backlit.” And the shot looked better.\n\nIf there's one thing O'Sullivan returns to across his whole critique, it's that backlight equals depth, and depth equals something people actually want to look at.\n\nPushing light from the same direction as the camera fills everything in equally—you see every detail—and the image goes flat. \n\nBacklighting separates your subject from the background, creates dimension in a two-dimensional medium, and gives your frame the sense that there's actually a world behind the person you're shooting. Every time he calls out a shot in the spec as working, it has at least a hint of backlight or lateral angle. Every time he sighs, it doesn't.\n\nHe talks about layers. Foreground, midground, and background all at different exposures and levels of interest. \n\nLighting multiple planes is how you get a cinematic image rather than a flat, evenly lit frame that looks like a well-exposed accident.\n\nThe fix for a corner kitchen is to turn around. Shoot out of the kitchen instead of into it, find a surface with depth behind it, get something interesting happening in the background, even if it's just production design on a dining table.\n\n## Maximum Control, Minimum Push\n\nThe other through-line is about control, specifically what you lose when you blast a single source into a scene.\n\n\"We want maximum control every place we can get it. And pushing the light into a scene, we're losing all control,\" he says.\n\nWhen your key light and your background light are the same fixture, any adjustment to one affects the other. You can't shape the subject without also blowing out the background.\n\nThe solution is to separate them. Use distinct, controllable sources for subject and background. Keep levels lower overall—in a controlled interior with no competing window light, you don't need much. The mistake in the spec is using too much light in the wrong direction, which paradoxically leaves you with less to work with.\n\nHe adds that you shouldn’t be too precious about your lighting in this scenario. Change your light direction between shots without stressing about matching. “Nobody cares,” he says.\n\nAlso, wrap the light rather than pushing it. Angling your source around the subject rather than straight into the scene gives you shape and shadow falloff even when you're stuck on a camera-side key.\n\n## Get Your Three Shots\n\nIn another moment of brutal honesty, O'Sullivan says, \"No one's watching your spec spot. Nobody.\"\n\nWhat you need from your spec is two or three strong frames you can point to as strong examples of your work. Clients or collaborators aren’t evaluating the full 30 seconds as a narrative arc. They want to know if you can make something nice-looking in a constrained situation.\n\nOptimize for three shots that look undeniable. The way to do that in spec work is by going macro. Go for tight, controlled setups where you can light a small area beautifully, compress the background, and let the frame carry the weight.\n\nHere, a cookie in close-up with great light is more impressive than a wide shot of a kitchen you can’t actually pull off.\n\nAlthough it’s difficult after the fact to see such a big, unfixable mistake in work like this, making that mistake is still useful because we can all learn from it and be better next time. Everyone’s always growing, after all.",
  "title": "What a Bad Spec Ad Can Teach You About Lighting"
}