Over the past week I have started to plan some shots that focus a lot on lighting and I have taken a few tests of these ideas. After these shoots I’m pretty excited to create a series of 20-30 second scenes or moments similar to the expertise exercise we did in class a few weeks ago. My aim for weeks 8-12 is to create a short scene every 3-4 days. These scenes can either be tied together in a film about lighting, or I can write a short film that would include all of these scenes.

I want to see how far I can take this idea of storytelling via lighting and see if it actually can translate to an audience. Because I am sort of drawn to crime and stuff it’ll probably show through some of the content. It is also quite prominent that I want to focus on different sources of light and how they can be used to light a subject and location. I don’t just want to use floodlights and lights we have here at school, but experiment with sources of light that are available to me.

(The order of the photographs I presented are the same as here)

Shot 1) This was my first attempt at backlighting, just using the street light as the light source. For a first attempt I think this is quite an interesting shot, and I believe it embodies a sense of mystery could really work in a short exercise.

Shot 2&3) These were my second attempts at backlighting, as I wanted to try it with a different source of lighting, in this case being the headlights of a car. This worked out quite well because I wanted to see a clear silhouette. For a short scene I was thinking I could maybe have someone just digging a hole. There doesn’t need to be any dialogue because people can just assume what’s happening.

Shot 4) For now, I don’t really want to work with natural lighting, because I am more interested in learning and exploring techniques with artificial lighting. I want to learn more about the gels because for these tests I just used cellophane so it would be good to look at a more professional way of doing this.

Shot 5) I always find this bus stop near my house really creepy at night because it seems so isolated but I thought it would be interesting to see how this fluorescent light worked on a subject. I don’t know if I’d make a scene on this shot, it didn’t really stand out to me.

Shot 6,7&8) I was thinking for a shot of this colouring, I could use it not in a realistic way but to add another element to a story eg like I could do a short scene on two people having an aggressive verbal fight.

Shot 9) I want to work with both actuality and then more dream/nightmarish sort of stuff. Like if I were to use the coloured gels then there’s probably only a handful of ways I could make this realistic, so I could use this lighting option for a more “other-worldly” sort of scene.

Shot 10) A few weeks ago when we did the first writing exercise, I started thinking about moments that reoccur in my life and I realized that sometimes when I get home at night I park in the street and I usually just stay in the car for a few minutes because I just get this bad feeling and I just get scared of leaving my car and like sometimes I’m there for like an hour. I didn’t even mean for them to kind of relate to this but in the two shots I recently of the girl sitting in the car from front on and from the side, they kind of remind me of this situation I’m always in, but like from the other side so I think these two shots could be used to help create this moment.

Shot 11) I kind of just wanted to see if this sort of lighting worked and I think it does so I could just have a scene of someone watching an old home movie or something.