I’m glad that you re-posted this thread after the original was closed down, as I wanted to respond to it.
Most of the work in your reel has a very stylized look, so I’m going to approach this from an animation point of view.
In animation, the single most important purpose of lighting is to advance the film’s story/narrative. Whenever a shot is conceived, and then subsequently reviewed, the same questions get asked over and over again. First and foremost, everyone from producers, directors, production designers, cg supervisors, etc. will ask what the viewer is supposed to be looking at. Alternately, this question is rephrased as “what is the point of this shot?”
Lighting fulfills that by way of using hue and value to direct the eye towards the focal point. In general, this means that if the main focal point of a shot is a character, then said character will be not be fighting with the background for a viewers attention. The easiest way to do this is to make the character brighter than its surroundings. Another way of achieving this is with color, that is to say that the focal point of the shot will be more saturated, or even warmer, than the background elements which can be saturated or even cooler.
That’s not to say that the entire background needs to be de-saturated, dark, and/or blue, as that will present a new issue of the character not being integrated into their background, but a subtle use of vignette, gradients, barn doors, and even atmospheric haze can go a very long way in terms of selling a shot. The use of shallow depth of field is useful for this as well, especially with closeup or over the shoulder shots. Extra careful care needs to be taken when using depth of field, though, as it can create the sense of looking at a miniature if used improperly.
With all of that in mind, your shot that works best is of the one of the guy sitting in the woods in front of the campfire. Lighting aside, the layout of this shot does a great job in terms of drawing the viewer’s eye to the center of the image, specifically in terms of the tents, the truck, and the picnic table all pointing in the direction of the camp fire and the main character. In terms of the lighting, it looks like there is a vignette applied as a post process effect, which helps a bit, but is also a bit obvious. You should try to do this with your lighting. You have the right idea in terms of having the screen right tree have only a sliver of light on its screen left portion, but I would push this look even further and then darken the outside part of the trunk. The ferns in the foreground are working very well, but again I would limit the influence of their direct light such that only the leaves closest to the center of the screen.
In regards to what I said earlier about background elements not being brighter than the focal point of the shot, the specular highlights on the cooler cover as well as on the car’s screen left bumper and headlights are very distracting, and I would turn those off all together. The upper screen right portion of the background is too bright as well, and draws the eye too much. Aside from the highlight on the cooler, that upper right corner is the brightest portion of the entire shot, and you really don’t want your viewer to be looking there.
The godrays are an interesting element in this shot, but they are currently a little bit distracting, and I would move them higher up and more to the screen left corner of the shot so that they are aiming more towards the character.
Finally, in terms of color, the campfire shot has a very nice and warm nostalgic feel to it, and really sells the notion of a sunset. It might be an interesting experiment, though, if you took all of the areas which aren’t in direct sunlight and tinted them blue instead. This would do two things. From a visual point of view, it would help push your vignette and draw more attention to the center of the shot. From a narrative point of view, this would emphasize the warmth coming from the fire as well as the setting sun.
The other stills that you posted don’t really work quite as well, but are still salvageable. Looking at the old woman crossing the street, ask yourself, what is your audience supposed to be looking at? To me, it’s not the woman crossing the street, as her direct light is limited to that of a rim light, causing her to read as a silhouette against the background. It’s not the restaurant either, as I can’t read the lighting on the sign of the restaurant. Instead, my eyes are drawn to the corners of the shot, as that is where the brightest and the warmest elements, the lamps, are located. So there are two approaches that you can take to this.
First, if you want the focus of the shot to be the woman, strongly downplay the brightness of the lamps in the corners. Take their brightness down to 33% or 25% of their current value. Keep the rim light that’s on the woman herself, and then add warm key light onto her from the screen right corner of the shot. This will both help us read her expression, as well as, again, drive the narrative of her crossing the street towards some bright unseen object.
Alternately, if you want the focus of the shot to be the restaurant, keep the light on the woman as is. Again, downplay the lights in the corners of the shot, add some light to the sign of the restaurant so that we can see what its name is, and light up the inside of it.
Finally, in regards to the shot of the pirate ship, there are two problems with it. First, I don’t know what the focus of the shot is, and second, I don’t know what the main light source is. Is it the moonlight, the candles, the lanterns? Right now, all of these light sources are fighting each other, which creates a sense that the shot is way too busy.
Now in terms of what you can do in your own time to improve as a lighting artist, I would say that you should watch a lot of animated films, and do so in such a way that you deliberately try to develop a critical eye. Watch them on your computer so that you can easily scrub back and forth between shots and scenes, and turn the sound off so that it’s not a distraction. Ask yourself the same questions that I described above. From a purely value point of view, it helps if you look at a black and white version of an image to see where the brightest points of a shot are, and how the falloff in brightness helps to draw the eye.
I’d also suggest buying some “art of” books from your favorite CG animated films so you can have access to the painted key art which is then used as reference in your own work. These painted keys are often exaggerated in a very graphic way as to convey to the lighting artist what the hue/value/direction of a light is so that they can use said painting as a reference in their own shots.
