This week’s lecture on lighting proved what many people have said time and time again; that you must experiment, test, fail, and improve in order to learn how to light a scene the way you want to.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

The most important point I took from this lecture is to do as many tests as possible at the location, and experiment with the different equipment. This is something that I have already mentioned to my group and that we’ll definitely do to ensure we get the best possible result for our film.