Lighting is both artificial and natural. Lighting is also about the absence of light. Even to dress a scene is an element of lighting.

So why do we light a scene in film?

First of all lighting is used for the obvious reason of making everything in the scene visible. Although it is used for much more than just that. Lighting is used to control a scene aesthetically. By controlling the quality, intensity, angle and more it becomes a creative expressive tool.

Furthermore lighting is used to maintain spatial continuity. For instance, you may have been shooting part of a scene outside and part of it in a studio. Particular lighting must be used to make footage captured in the studio to appear as if it is outside.

Lighting is also vital in temporal continuity. For instance it may take a whole day to shoot a 60 second scene outside. Throughout the day the sun will constantly be changing position, affecting the lighting of the scene significantly. To counter this lighting techniques such as using blackouts and reflectors must be used.

Light can be either hard or soft. Hard light often creates harsh, sharp edged shadows whereas with soft lighting, the light is more diffused and evenly spread. Hard lighting occurs when you have a concentrated light source. Soft lighting occurs when the illumination is more scattered. Each have their purpose in the world of film.

Hard lighting is generally more difficult to use successfully than soft lighting. Soft lighting is efficient, quick and more forgiving. It’s a lot more noticeable if you get hard lighting wrong, due to the hard-lined shadows.

In our class exercise yesterday to soften the light source we bounced the light off a white board. If we were to use a silver reflective surface the light would have been harder and more spotty. It’s interesting to note that you can use a black board to give negative light, as the light does not reflect off the surface.

Key lighting is the main light source in a scene. For instance in yesterdays exercise our key lighting was bounced off the wall and directed straight at the two characters. We also used fill lighting to soften the effect of shadows on our characters faces. It was interesting to note how the light lit up the two subjects faces different due to different skin tone and face shape.

When we talk about lighting we use terms such as key, fill, hard, soft, diffuse, direct, spread, contrast, quality, color. As well as descriptive terms such as naturalistic, theatrical, stylised, realistic & interpretative.

This talk of lighting has made me think that a reflector could be useful when I’m interviewing people at the anti-mosque protest so I can fill light the subjects faces.

EXERCISE 9A

https://drive.google.com/a/rmit.edu.au/file/d/0B4xPXyVvunuSc3RPU1VpVXU3eEU/view?usp=sharing