Initially, I wasn’t going to make my own video considering I already have a lot on my plate – Pavina and Ben’s assignment to help out with on top of the post-production work and also other assignments for my assessment. Ultimately, I wanted to have my own work to take pride in plus have Pavina and Ben’s project as extra work for extra experience.

Lately, I’ve been into the whole concept of lighting and how it works – I’ve had a fascination around it since the start of the semester. This time, I wanted to actually get a bit more technical and use my own lighting – I rented through RMIT AV Loans alongside a boom pole and microphone.

The inspiration behind this all came from shows that I’ve watched on Netflix, called American Vandal and Youtube that helped me out with knowing how to use lighting:

Soft Boxes 101: A Lighting Lesson 

You can see how well-lit both of these examples are especially around the face and how it creates nice shadows around it as well. The quality of American Vandal is something that I am to go for –

I also studied three-point lighting through Youtube videos and reading websites such as forums and articles that give advice in order to manipulate lighting to how we want it. What I found out through these tips were the three main lighting and that was:

• Key light – the main point of lighting and should be the brightest out of all the three. It can be placed either on the left or right side on a 45º angle and hits the subject’s face nicely to create dimension on either side of the face.
• Fill light – if you would rather not have any shadows on the face, you use 50% of the fill light to make up for the shadows. In my project, however, I wanted it to have a more serious and less-gimmicky look so I only used 15-25% of the fill light.
• Finally, for the backlight – it’s not completely necessary but if you wanted your production to have a more elevated look, you can use it to highlight the hair of your subject and also a little bit of the white backdrop.

I believe that I have achieved it in some ways, but due to the type of equipment that I’ve hired (it isn’t on the high-end level like other productions have used), it didn’t exactly produce the type of results that I wanted, much like in the sample photos above. However, it was still a fair attempt of replicating the standard lighting technique to get the best dimension out of the subject’s face. Here are the results:

These are all the raw images I took before actually shooting the video – they were also my subject for my final video. You can see the shadows on the right side of their face, including the background – it was exactly what I wanted but obviously, it doesn’t have the same quality that was aiming for from the examples that I provided. Despite that, these footages and images are a good starting point for me, especially for my journey and progress to be a capable videographer/cinematographer.

In terms of the content, I will be honest – I was still unsure what my video was supposed to be about, despite setting up and preparing my set. I figured that I would freestyle and talk to the people who were willing to be part of my production. Because I did make the lighting look a bit more serious and dramatic. I definitely knew that I was going to be interviewing people in regards to life matters – it’s just that I didn’t know what exactly the content was going to be about. However, as I got closer to the shooting time with my family, I eventually decided on the topic:

What advice would you give to your past self? 

And basically talks of their life experiences.

I interviewed people in my life to answer the questions from above – it also didn’t have to follow the exact format as I freestyled during the interview, I asked questions that followed their answer to make the interview lengthier. Of course, everything will be edited once it is on Premiere Pro. My plans for it is to segment the same questions together instead of putting it from one interview to another. Once it’s all put together, it’ll have a dramatic and serious tone (I hope).