Personal reflection – Project 1

Our first shoot was, for all its exertion, still very useful for our learning process. To act as a basic framework, we knew we wanted to have a night-time scene, two characters and some sort of interplay between the mise en scene and the lighting set up.

The process of conception and production, I imagine, mirrored that of a professional production – another intent of our group. Out first consideration was the script. For this we put foremost effort into creating a short scenario that stressed the manipulation of lighting elements; with the actual narrative being a secondary thought.

With this in mind, we decided to create a lighting set up that included three LED panels as well as the light coming from the car within the scene. The lighting plan is detailed further in this blog.

Th overall thematic effect we desired from our lighting was to create a foggy night-time scene with an assumed full moon in an urban car park. The fact of its urbanity meant that we had some liberties in terms of lighting the scene more rigorously than in real life – night time cityscapes often possess a large amount of stray light.   

One of the main challenges was making sure our set up had enough power. The issue lay with the restraint of having a power source at some distance from the proposed set. The eventual solution was to simply muster the greatest number of extension chords we could find. Most of the lights were indeed battery powered, however, the smoke machine that we planned to feature could only be powered from the aforementioned mains outlet.

One of the main challenges we faced was the need to reposition lights as the shots changed. As the camera was intercutting between a wide range of shot angles and sizes, the luminosity of the reflected light from the subjects, as well as the quality of highlight-shadow ratios changed dramatically. It was for this reason that we needed to pay careful attention to the reference monitor and, I must admit, some issues did require subtle assistance through colour grading. Camera movement also posed a challenge in this respect. With lighting coming from a number of points, any camera repositioning during the take required concern to be taken for not revealing the location of our artificial lighting.

Above is a BTS shot from our set