Lighting

When tasked with lighting, I was relatively puzzled as to what to write about. However, after a few minutes of research I was overwhelmed with ways in which I could create effective lighting to bring attention to an object, or to draw attention past the object and towards the foreground or background. There are, however, two main methods of lighting I’d like to look at using in our production.

The first method is basically soft/hard lighting. This is a technique which was initially used in Noir films to add a more ‘cool’ feel to the film as the films were all about stylish gangster staring at something to the side for dramatic effect. This can be put into psychological horror films. For instance, someone is sat down working at a desk which is facing away from the door. The fore lighting would be as simple as a desk lamp which I've used for my demonstration, and then have harder lighting such as a hallway light which is shining into the room. This can be used to draw attention to the hallway from the audience to notice a person’s shadow darting across the hallway or to create an outline of a figure standing in the doorway to the room.

This is the setup I used. It involved a small desk lamp positioned behind/next to the camera and then harder lighting in the back ground to create the effect.

This was the effect created by the soft/hard lighting. The face of the guitar is gently lit up. However, I feel like my attention is being drawn towards the two guitars in the background as they're highlighted by the harder lighting.

The next method I have used for lighting, isn't a technique as such, but more of a way of directing light. I created my own lighting reflector as opposed to buying one and you can still get similar effects with a flat object and some foil.

As you can see, all I had done was wrap some foil around a baking tray and now it's good to go.

All I had done was use a music stand to hold the reflector steady and then angled hard lighting at the reflector.

This is the effect it created. Although the light is more focused at a single point compared to using the hard lighting I had avaliable, this is really good for filming outside at night as you could easily have a light directed at the reflector mounted on a tripod to pan following a character.