In our daily lives, we will see a variety of lights. For example, at home, we will see a lot of warm light, all the colorful lights in the casino, including warm and cold light. And most of the government agencies are cold in a single color. Different light qualities and colors also produce different effects. The warm yellow light in the home represents warmth and love, while the entertainment venue needs to create different effects to satisfy different people. For example, blue represents depression, red represents sex and passion. The cold light of a single color may represent tension and seriousness. Lighting in the film is not only to illuminate the environment, but also to create an atmosphere that indirectly expresses the character’s inner feelings and also expresses the director’s intention. The movie comes from life and is higher than life. The same is true for lighting, and the lights in movies are hard to see in real life because of the need for post-processing to make the picture more vivid. Although some of the natural light in life can be used, more of the movies use artificial light sources. The reason for which lights are necessary in filmmaking is that film, and to an even greater extent video, does not respond to light the same way our eyes do. Specifically, film and video see things in a much more contrasty way. In other words, they cannot cope with the lighting contrast of real life. In any case, there is more to cinematography than simply making the actors visible and photographing them. For top results, the mood of the film must be carefully crafted with lighting, amongst other things.

This week we did two exercises, one of taking control of the depth of field, another shooting a small clip using Robbin’s script in order to compare two different shots so that we could get inspriation in this process.
As the exercise 2 instruction, focal length, lens aperture and the distance between the object and lens, these three factors could directly influence to depth of field. To achieve the shallowest depth of field, we just follow the guide to adjust three factors at first, while when we play it on the monitor, we found that the depth of field is not particularly noticeable. So we made a small change of people sitting in front of camera. We let Aria sit behind Dan but not close, then camera focus on Dan’s face, so you could see in the monitor that Aria is already in the depth of field.

We think this way could make much more contrasts between the object and background because if there is nothing on the background, there is not contrast. Perhaps you could not seperate which is greater or shallower the depth of field in your first mind. I think this belongs to framing to make setting up first before recording. This method is similar to photography. But the most important factors to achieve the changes of depth of field are focal length, aperture and the distance. We also find the ND filters could affect the greater the depth of field. Nd filter 2 could achieve the same effects that small aperture do. For my perspective of the depth of field, it is likely to make three dimensions on the screen to let audience see more details on the image/video.

For the small clip, we film called “Mullins Returns”, which involves a wide shot and two medium close-up each character. On the first day, We made mistake because we did not completely understand the requirement. We just shoot each character in one location with wide shot and MCU’s. After we’ve done this, we realised that it should shoot in different location and then to match each other. So Brews and I decided to borrow the equipment to shoot again in the next day. However, these two days weatehr is different, first day was sun day but the second day was cloudy. That means we should manipulate the white balacne so that the second day clip could match the first day that we did. Actually we need more color temperature on cloudy day, but we could not use any light sources to copy the first day light because this is in outdoor, it is impossible to do that. I turned the white balance 5600k to 6000k. This time we shoot in different location, still medium close-up. However, one more thing should be noticed for us, the sun light comes from the head top in the first day and we are sit in the shadow area, you can see clearly which is key light, fill light. In the second day, because of the weather we may not shoot the same scene but we could adjust the aperture to make up for the lack of light(F1.9-F4). Also, we shoot a close up with 56 focal length to achieve shallow depth of field, because the more shallower depth of field, audience would get less detail. So it is easy to match other clips，the audience is also hard to find the difference. From this process, I summed two points. One of is if you get wrong clips that can not be used. This approach could be a good way to shoot again. Noticing the light direction and try best to use shallower the depth of field. The ND filter and gain could be pretty helpful to control the exposure. The last thing is change the white balance that could match others. Another point is good editing could trick brain. As we did, we choose completely different location to shoot two characters, we just put these clips together to create a dialogue atmosphere, but the fact is we are talking to the air each other. Although we see a picture／video frame, the brain automatically generates a complete story structure. I think this may be the charm of the movie.