You can do that kind of lighting effect in post-production fairly easily, and to a good standard (by adding virtual lights etc). You may want to light a normal scene and experiment with it digitally.

Yeah, you can tell from the shadows that the shots are lit by multiple lights, so they must be faking the 'light on camera' effect in post... brightening the center and turning the edges to black. If it was a real light, you'd still see detail in the edges from the other lights.

haha thanks guys! I wondered about that...or at least if it would be possible in post. does anyone have an idea how it can be achieved using Adobe Premiere Pro? Sorry for all the questions I'm a relatively inexperienced director...I'm only 17! Thanks for your help.

Will

Not sure about Premiere, I'm afraid. You could probably do it by overlaying an image that has a white center and black circle around the edges, with an alpha channel so the black is opaque and the white goes from transparent to partially opaque from the edge to the center of the circle.

That would block out the edges while brightening up the centre.

Yeah I've tried a similar approach before to solve a different problem...it tended to look unnatural because of the sharpness of the edges. Ah well..I'm sure there's a way of doing it... I'll have a go next time I'm grading some footage!

Thanks guys for solving my problem!

It could have been done in-camera, just using a filter on the camera. I couldn't tell if the "light" was moving or not - obviously, if it was moving, it wasn't a filter...

Regardless, you can get a very similar effect in-camera.