Lecture 7 Lighting: What was covered? Do you think the content is relevant to your project? And why?

The lighting lecture covered quite a lot of information which will be helpful for planning and shooting our film. Lighting, by definition, is a result of exposure. Being comfortable with adjusting exposure levels on your camera and adjusting the positions of the subject, camera and artificial lights are all important to achieving the correct level of exposure.

There are a few reasons why lighting is important to a film; we light for exposure – so the subject and location is visible, for continuity – in terms of temporal (time of day) and spatial, to have control over the image – stylistic choices and tone, and to achieve a good key to fill contrast ratio – the key light being the brightest or more prominent, with the fill being the less prominent light (could be bounced or reflected).

An important point I took from the lecture was to know your location and do test shoots before filming. This will allow any changes needed to be made to the shot schedule, if for example, you realise during your test shoot that too much sunlight floods the particular location at midday, so you choose to shoot there in the early morning. Understanding the natural lighting that occurs at different times of the day at your location is important to scheduling the shoot and making choices of fixing these issues; such as blacking out a room or shooting at a different time of day. This is something that we will be doing tomorrow on our test shoot as we will be experimenting with the natural lighting at the location as well as implementing the artificial lights, gels, reflectors and negative fill to see how we would like to set up the lights for our shoot next week. We will take photos of our setups so that we have a reference of how we would like to light and position the camera, as well as photos to represent a storyboard that we can follow on the day.

Communicating with the director is also very important as it ensures that you both understand how the coverage of a scene will be shot, so that you know where the lighting equipment needs to be positioned for that particular shot. Keeping your eye on the bigger picture and understanding how the lighting will maintain continuity or not (depending on stylistic choices) is also something to think about during pre-production and on the shooting day. In terms of our film we will ensure that we plan as well as we can as a result of our test shoot and I along with the rest of the technical crew will ensure that we communicate with Torika and Michael so that we don’t have problems on our shooting day.

An interesting point that I hadn’t thought of previously to this lecture, was that a lighting set-up can involve taking lights out of the location rather than introducing them. This is also known as negative fill and can be achieved by using a large black card to reduce the amount of light illuminating the subject’s face.

Select from one of the readings from week 5, 6 or 7 and describe two points that you have taken from it. Points that excite you, something that was completely new to you.

Out of the lighting readings from week 7, the one I took the most from was the Malkiewicz reading. It gives really in-depth descriptions of different types of lighting techniques for different types of lighting that you may want to achieve.

One of the important points I took from the reading is in regards to how we will light most of our film. The advice that comes from the reading for filming interior day scenes is that it requires soft light, meaning that it is diffused and doesn’t create harsh shadows. The only hard light would come from the sunlight coming in from the windows, which can be prevented on location by closing curtains. These types of scenes usually have the upper parts of the wall as being darker, depending on the natural location of the sun at the particular time of day. This is important as if you want to achieve a realistic impression of day time, even with the interior being quite dark, it’s important to keep in mind that the upper parts of the wall should be dark.

Another important point is to be wary of creating unwanted shadows. Each source of light can create shadows depending on their position in relation to the subject and when you add artificial lights, the trick is to ensure that shadows are kept to a minimum. You must try and only produce one shadow, or two if you really have to. This is due to that in real life we are used to seeing only one shadow, or one direction of shadow as they would naturally occur. Having multiple shadows with competing directions are unrealistic and distracting for audiences. This is where planning how you will set up your lights for your shoot comes into play as you can experiment with positions, heights and angles to prevent multiple shadows occurring.