For this project, lighting is one of the more important elements. I have really little experience with lighting in general, this includes lighting setups and the lighting gear on its own.

I’ve worked with an LED light panel before for my last project, so that’s what I used this time as well. Most of the time I’ve worked with lights, other people are in charge of it most of the time, especially the assembly. This time however, I was able to set it up myself and get to understand how it works better.

Setting up the light was not as complicated, all I had to do was put the panel on top of the stand, but from here we can choose to either plug the light to a power source or just power it with a battery. Then, we can adjust the brightness intensity, as well as adjust the white balance with the diffuser panels provided. In my case i used a lot of the orange panel to make my shots look unnaturally warm.

Next it’s the lighting set-up. I had a lighting workshop during my previous studio for photography, but as it was a bit chaotic so I didn’t really remember much. Nevertheless, I found a video on youtube that explained the different set ups really well.

First of all there’s broad/wide side, this means the light will be from the same direction as the camera.

As we can see, the side facing us is well lit, while the other is in the shadow.  This lighting creates just enough depth on her face.

The opposite of that is short side, which will have the lighting from the other side of the camera, and this creates a really dramatic effect

This shot in particular is pretty dark so we can’t really see much of her face. This creates a very creepy vibe to the shot.

There’s side light, which is when the light covers perfectly just half of the face.

As we can see, this is also used to create a really dramatic effect, as we can only see half of her face, with the other half seemingly consumed by the dark.

All in all, these different lighting setups created different feels, though mostly dramatic and mysterious, which is what I’m trying to do with my movie.

Below is the video.