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Week 6 of FIlm Light was quite busy, but it contained one of my favourite exercises to date! Unfortunately (again), I wasn’t able to make it into class on Tuesday, due to a sustained ankle injury that left me bedridden. But I rested it right up and ready for Thursday, where I was ready to make up for it and then some. Unfortunately (seemingly becoming my catchphrase), I had to leave early, but Thursday was all about exercise 6!
From an initial glance, exercise 6 is just like every other we have been assigned in Film Light, vague scripts, basic named characters and a set time limit. But to me, this was different. Exercise 6 had two groups capture both visuals and audio of a scene over 3 shots. However, there was a twist! Whilst the main wide and one close up mid-shot could be filmed in the same location, the other characters mid-shot had to be shot somewhere else, and we as a crew had to use lighting and camera tricks to make the scene itself as believable as possible.
This excited me for a few reasons. For one, I hadn’t been in class for a while, so it was nice to see and work with my fellow classmates, but the main intrigue of the task was how the twist was going to make us all have to recall all the skills we had previously attained throughout the course to make this location switch work, which was both terrifying and thrilling.
Tash had a great potential location, so we all went down and scouted outside the Streat cafe, with the brick walls on the buildings opposite being an easy thing to replicate.
The crew brought a little bit of everything, and whilst we never got the chance/needed to use the c-stands or shot bags, we felt safer with them. I assumed the role of first assistant director, and basically ensured that everyone understood what Tash wanted to be done, as well as cracked down on packing-up time.
The shoot itself went really well, we had enough people that everyone had a role to play in some capacity, and no one was left completely without a job. We played around with depth of field and eyelines to cheat the location, and whilst I haven’t fully analysed the footage as of yet, my initial scrub through looks as if it works. However, we kind of forgot to be conscious of the lighting, which in a lighting studio, is pretty funny.
I am going to have an edit up on my Mediafactory blog once it’s done within the next few days, but I am excited to see how it turns out! Never the less, I had so much fun working on this exercise, and hope for more like this in the future!
As has probably become apparent through the emerging pattern in Film Light assignments, I absolutely love Jake Gyllenhaal. I’ve even learnt how to spell his last name without fail! I love the quality and variety of his acting portfolio, especially copious amount of smaller, independent films featuring him that tell unique and complex stories. One such film is Enemy (Villeneuve, 2013), which tells the tale of a professor finding a lookalike of himself, and delves deeper into the man’s life.
The scene I have chosen to analyse the lighting of is not really a spoiler, as it is such an isolated and relatively disjointed scene from the main story of the film. This is a dream sequence, and while the whole scene is quite ambiguous and intriguing, even to someone watching the whole film, I think the lighting says a lot
The scene itself is quite warm, with tungsten coloured lightbulbs visible in frame lighting the foreground of the shot, and a backlight in the corridor behind the subject in the frame. The camera slowly moves towards the subject, with the light bouncing off the white tiles of the wall right of camera. Just before we pass the subject, she begins to be more lit, specifically from the downlight of the bulb furthest from the camera, and most likely a light behind the camera. She walks past, turning her head with light reflecting off her bulging spider eye (it’s a strange film, but really good!). We then cut to Gyllenhaal’s character, waking from a dream in his dim bedroom, lit by the tungsten/yellow glow of his hallway and the street lamps seeping into the bedroom.
The whole scene is quite dim and soft, alluding to a mysterious tone, The way the light sources barely reach the end of the corridor masks the subject in a silhouette, giving off the element of the unknown, made into somewhat sinister through the heightened musical score. The whole set gives off a foreboding and sinister vibe through the lighting, not knowing what’s coming and being obscured by darkness creates a tone that keeps the viewer on edge. The dim lighting also allows the viewer to experience the surprise of a nude woman with a spider head walking past what we learn to be the perspective of Jake Gyllenhaal’s character.
It all culminates into one off-putting scene, which is really bolstered by the lighting, and I look forward to putting more of my lighting knowledge to practice in analysis in the future!
This week of class was quite a practical experience. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to Tuesday’s class, which was a bummer, but it did allow me to come in with a fresh pair of eyes to the work that was done without me present.
The class did a lighting comparison between different sources, attempting to replicate sunlight coming through a window. Speaking to Tash, the wonderful model of the shoot, the original plan was to have direct proper sunlight for the first comparison, but it wasn’t strong enough. ‘Available Daylight’ was still used, but I was under the impression it wasn’t ideal. Never the less, watching through this comparison with little to no prior knowledge of it really let me judge the artificial light sources and how naturalistic it looked on camera.
On the initial viewing, the light looked semi-realistic, but if I was told the artificially assisted versions were all direct sunlight only, I would have been sceptical. To me, this is because the fill of the 2K Fresnel w/ Full Blue Gell bounced off core board w/ Fill was just a bit too dim to be sunlight, maybe very cloudy sunlight, but not direct sunlight. There are a few too many shadows on the camera right side of Tash’s face, maybe needing some more bounce and fill to even out.
Thinking like this is helpful in thinking about lighting a set I am actually on, such as Thursday’s exercise. Even though I was only an actor, once I had my lines down, I was fully invested in thinking about how everything on set worked, specifically the lighting rigging. I was always trying to think of a new way we could light the scene and be sneaky about it, and while I only offered minimal help from my position, I was constantly taking stuff in, lets hope it sticks!
In the reading Robin posted this week by Sven Nykvist documenting his life and views on filmmaking, one specific part stuck out and felt relatable to my whole outlook on lighting. He wrote, ‘Light is a treasure chest; once properly understood, it can bring another dimension to the medium’. This is the exact sort of epiphany I had the first time I really tried to light a scene, seeing how much potential there was in the art, and how much it can drastically change the potential of a scene.
Whilst we didn’t exactly achieve that sense of enlightenment in Exercise 4, the group definitely felt how difficult and mind straining it can be, even when a simple solution is right in front of you!
On Tuesday, Noah, Jagger, Elenor, Amelia and I were tasked with filming two shots for Exercise 4, with one of the shots requiring a lighting change, with the sun coming through the window. Luckily, we didn’t have to show the window, so this could all be done behind the scenes.
The team got really creative brainstorming different ways in which we could make this exposure change look as natural and directed as possible, like how the sun would bounce into a room. We decided we wanted to use one of the 1k Fresnel lights in some sort of way, just because we had our hands on them. Below is the video in which our test shoots are shown, starting at 3:00.
I think the main problem was that we may have thought too hard about how to make the sunbeams enter, with an easy solution there all along.
I really like how the scene is lit all together. The light itself feels really natural, and our faces are well lit. However, in the first take of the second shot, there is a glaring hot patch of over-exposed wall next to Amelia’s head. Luckily, that is not the case in the second take!
How we made the ‘sun’ come in was by moving a black bounce board away from in front of the Fresnel light. While the brightness of the light I feel looks fine, it cuts too hard a shaped shadow on the wall, being a very direct edge.
What was later pointed out to us, was that we should have just raised the blinds in the room, which would have probably worked better, and been easier! Never the less, experiences like these teach you so much about lighting, so I wouldn’t trade this version for the best version in the world! (maybe for a portfolio piece though!).