There were more than a few complications in completing the first exercise/test in Assignment 4, but I should start from the beginning.

Our mission statement / what we set out to test was:

“To experiment with how colour temperature and white balance affects the tone and mood of a basic scene.”

This was born during the Film Light class in which we learnt how to manually white balance, something that was not new information to me at the time, but the refresher was useful. We were then encouraged to play around with white balancing with off white surfaces, and even some bold colours. These produced wildly different results to the proper procedure, and inspired creativity between Chloe, Tash and I. We then grouped up with Jonah, and after discussing our idea with Robin, we came to the conclusion that we wanted to experiment with the effect both colour temperature and light balance had on the mood of a scene.

From there, I wrote up a short script with somewhat thriller-ish tones, and we set out to film on Monday the 23rd of September. However, as stated in a previous blog post, this didn’t go to plan, due to some unforeseen (but probably should have been foreseen) complications with light cables.

Whilst defeated for a short while, this failure only made us more determined to smash this project out ASAP, and come the following  Monday, we felt more prepared than ever! The gear had been hired the week before, ensuring we had every piece of equipment available to us, a location with sufficient power outlets and manipulatable lighting surfaces was found and available, and even though we were down a member with Tash interstate, she was ready to edit this bad boy up for the presentation the next day. We were set, and it turned out pretty good!

Time for some behind the scenes info; we shot this just behind our building 10 classroom, near an unavailable access elevator.

We then converted this

into these

We used the black cutter, raised by a c-stand, to block out a majority of the excess overhead lighting, making our 2k Fresnel’s light source to the right of the camera much more controllable.

We did 2 different colour temperatures, with two different white balances in those colour changes, equating to four different shots. Two of these shots were under a tungsten light colour temperature, one with a regular white balance, and one with a white balance off the purple of my jacket. The second set of shots were under a blue light colour temperature, one with again, a regular white balance, and the other from the orange of Chloe’s fluoro bag.

Overall, I’d say the experiment as a whole was a success. We were really impressed and intrigued by the affects an abstract white balance had on the mood when infused with colour temperatures on a scene. Even though you would rarely if ever want to do this on set, because of how it limits you in post, and how it alters skin tones, I personally really liked both abstract colour temperatures. I thought the green in the second scene gave off this ‘creature feature’, from the blue lagoon vibe, and the fourth scene felt like I could have been lit by the moonlight aboard a boat, with the proper soundscape of course.

However, there were many shortcomings leading up to this experiment, including some poor time management and gear checking partially on our behalf. Nevertheless, we are going to make sure to take more time and effort and put it towards the upcoming next experiment, no more last-minute shoots! (knock on wood).