Question 2
There are a few interesting things in week 7’s lighting a scene readings. One of the point would be filming at night. I thought the section on night interior filming was very essential to me and my group work because the film we will be shooting is during the night and indoors. It states that for night scenes, hard, directional lighting is more justified but also depending on the type of practical sources visible in the frame and the visual concept of the film. On set, there will be multiple lights used and hence it will cast multiple shadows on the actors. Shadows can be very distracting and it is best to reduce the amount of shadows. In the readings, Michael D. Margulies mention about working the film without shadows even with hard light because he wants to bring the film to the realm of reality. One of the ways to do that would be controlling the soft light on the subject, or using another hard light bounced on a piece of white board and towards the subject.
Another point that excites me would be on lighting faces. Lighting is an amazing too which is use to shaping the actor’s face and making the look good on screen and also interpreting the mood of the scene. Actors can be sensitive about some of their flaws, hence they have to be cooperative when dealing with lighting. John Alonzo stated an example that if a person has a double chin and does not want to show it, the lighting person should raise the key light up higher and put a dark shadow under the chin. There are a lot of tricks with lighting to make the scene look more fine yet realistic.
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An example of soft lighting.
I took a ‘selfie’ during the lighting tutorial. There were two lights being placed at me. A back light and a side light. I should have taken more pictures.
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Question 3
It is apparent that Michelangelo Antonioni did a fantastic job in Blow Up. In this particular scene, I noticed there are a lot of shots taken from multiple angles. It starts off with a close up shot at Thomas and as he walks towards the door, the camera pans accordingly until it becomes a long shot. As Jane walks into the shot, the camera angle goes into a medium shot with both of characters in the frame. Then the characters walk into a series of doors and up the stairs with tracking motions. When they are up at the studio, there are various of different shots such as from the top angle, side angle and many more, as both the characters have their conversation. Some of which are accompanied with some camera movements as well such as tracking and panning.
It was mentioned and demonstrated in the lecture on the use of tracking and focus pulling. There will be three person by the camera, a camera operator, a focus puller and someone who pulls the camera across the tracks. As the subject moves, the focus points will change and that is why the focus puller is important else the subject will be out of focus at certain points. The best example will be during Jane walking back and forth at the purple screen before it was pulled down by Thomas (2:08 – 2:32). It was a panning movement with zooming in and out and it focuses on Jane. The focus puller will have one point of focus as the camera zooms in when Jane is on the left and another focus point when Jane walks to the right.
In this scene, Antonioni uses various of camera angles and shots in different angles and therefore he would have to direct both technical and the actors equally. There is a perk for doing these kind of shots will be having the actors standing by for quite some time as the technical side will take quite some time to be ready and they possibly might need multiple takes in case of mistakes. Therefore, Antonioni would have to have the actors at position all the time before he says ‘action’.