How was this lit?

I'd say some softbox on stands, with something like that. That's how I would have done it, but I'm no pro:
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I don't know what lights they used, but I've gotten a look much like it with an Arri Softbank light. It's pretty simple, just use one of these and little or nothing else:

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Some sort of soft source from below and camera right that looks warmed up a bit (looks like it's mimicking a table lamp to me) and something higher up and camera left to give the talent a slight edge and light the room. I don't think a goal post, especially one as heavy duty as the one pictured above, would be necessary or useful.
 
Not trying to be a dick, but how they did it is really irrelevant, unless you have the same size stage, available lighting & grip package, and use the same blocking. If it were me, I would have your DP advance scout your intended location so he or she knows what they are up against in advance. Just my thoughts.
 
I dunno, I find it a useful skill to be able to estimate how something was lit. That way you can come up with your own variations to suit your own needs, based on what worked for others.

But it's a give a man a fish thing. If you just straight up go find out exactly how every scene was precisely lit and that's it, yeah, it's not going to be too useful because you won't be in those exact situations. But learning how someone else lit something is part of developing the skill to be able to tell on your own how different things are lit. Which is a very useful skill to have.
 
I see your point, but if you are shooting in a 10x12 room and your light kit consists of Tungsten 1K, 650w, and a CFL soft box, how does knowing that an 18K HMI was used for the moonlight, or that a 5K Tungsten bounced into unbleached muslin was used for interior fill left when wall A was removed for that angle? This is something the DP on the shoot should be handling.
 
David W. Jones said:
I see your point, but if you are shooting in a 10x12 room and your light kit consists of Tungsten 1K, 650w, and a CFL soft box, how does knowing that an 18K HMI was used for the moonlight, or that a 5K Tungsten bounced into unbleached muslin was used for interior fill left when wall A was removed for that angle? This is something the DP on the shoot should be handling.
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I learned most of my lighting skills from drawing. It's just shaping light.

Knowing where the light is being motivated from etc. I could care less what kinds of lights they used, because knowing what type of light does what is more important. A soft light is a soft light and a hard light is a hard light.

Sometimes watching a movie it's hard to tell where the light is coming from. I don't really need to know if they used an 18K HMI, because I'm not filming on a huge set where that'd be needed in the first place. But, I know how to do math and figure out how to do something similar by using what I have, if I know the basis of how the scene was setup and what kinds of light were used and where they might have been motivated from.
 
Azmyth said:
Sometimes watching a movie it's hard to tell where the light is coming from.
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Look for shadows, particularly under the neck and around the nose.

In the SCREAM 4 example you gave, when Heroes girl faces camera left, we see a small shadow right underneath her chin, and not very far down. This indicates the light was coming from somewhere camera left, close to straight on, but somewhat to her right, farther from the camera (since we see part of the shadow on her cheek too) and near but a little above eye level. If the shadow on her neck were deeper, we'd know it was higher up. If there were no shadow on her cheek we'd know the light was directly where she was looking or closer to the camera (and we could tell the difference when she turned to face the camera). It's a soft shadow and there's no discernible shadow from her nose or face, but there are lights and darks, so we can guess it was a soft source but not a SUPER soft source. My guess, from there being a vertical (chin) shadow but not a nose shadow, would be a kino flo, but a softbox on a tungsten could have also been used. But we know it wasn't an hmi punching through a book light or spread across a wall because then we'd see almost NO shadow. It'd also be a lot harder to keep that back wall dark if that were the case.

Okay, then she walks more left and that shadow deepens across her shoulder. Even more evidence it's a little further from camera and above her, since as she walks towards it those attributes become more pronounced. As she turns to face the camera, we see a little more of the nose-shadow that we didn't see before, telling us it's not VERY far further from the camera than she is. If it were significantly farther from the camera, we'd have seen the nose shadow before she turned.

We can also see some hard backlight coming from camera right. Well, it's side-light to us, backlight to her since she's in profile.

That's the first set-up. Then when the other chick gets up it looks like we maybe have a new set-up. It's also possible they just repositioned her but left the light where they were.

Let's again look for shadows.

Really big, obvious nose-shadow giving it away. That sucker's going straight up into her eye, so we know the source is coming from below (as you get more experienced, you'll be able to spot from-below lights really quickly. It's a very set look)

She's also got no neck shadow, so if we didn't know it already we'd know it's not coming from above (or that it was suuuuper soft, but given the fall-off into darkness on the camera left side of her face, we know the lack of shadow isn't due to how soft the light is)

Now we can see the backlight is more of a real backlight, coming from camera left. It's highlighting her right shoulder and hairline but not really creeping around it. It's creeping around a LITTLE, so we know it's coming a little from above, but not a whole lot.

Now, just from experience, I'm guessing this is where they used a softbox/chimera. They might have used it earlier too, but this "look" really looks like chimera stuff to me. It's not very soft (we easily see the nose shadow and shadows from her hands as she raises them to her face) but it's not a bare hard tungsten either-- those shadows aren't THAT well defined. It COULD have been a kinoflo just farther away, but I find that unlikely.

Obviously there's some type of cookie or pattern in front of it, as she occasionally steps into and out of hot spots.

Okay so that's my little example of how to start recognizing where light is coming from, as well as hopefully answers your original question of how this was lit.

if you REALLY want to get better at this kind of thing... go get some friends together, get a light package, pick your favorite scene (older indie movies preferable, without a lot of grading done) and recreate the scene. It'll be massively wonderful for learning about this kind of stuff.
 
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