This week I noticed a somewhat bizarre lighting event in real life that seems to be a fairly rare occurrence. Right at the time at which it should be golden hour, rather than the sky going a soft golden colour, it skewed more towards a sort of pink-orange colour. This effect seems to only occur during golden hour just after it has been raining (and even then it doesn’t always happen) and creates a rather strange other-worldly sort of feeling through its very short duration.
Upon recognising this oddly unnatural looking natural effect, I began trying to think of an example for this kind of look in a film, and ultimately the only example I could think of was from one of my favourite films, Spike Jonze’s “Her”, which utilises a similar colour palette of soft oranges and pinks. It seems fitting that this film is the only one I can think of which comes close to the real life look I’m referring to as it’s probably the only film I can think of that seems to reproduce the same sort of melancholic feel that the real life effect gives me. Given how unique this effect seems to be both in real life and in cinema, I’d definitely like to look into trying to recreate it through a combination of lighting and colour grading at some point in my own time as this sort of look is certainly stylistically in line with where I would like to go with my future cinematography endeavours.
The lighting test we performed in the Tuesday class this week (20/8) was somewhat enlightening for me, in that I think upon reviewing it I have recognised another very important reason for lighting (and particularly in replicating natural lighting) and that is mood. By this I mean that it is one thing to closely replicate a light source, but it is another thing entirely to create the same mood – which I believe is in every way more difficult to do. The two examples from this exercise aren’t terribly different from each other, but there is a discernible impact on the overall mood of the shots which I think is happening for two main reasons.
Firstly, in the shot with natural lighting, the light has a certain softness to it which just isn’t totally replicated in the shot using equipment. The light wraps around Tash’s face in a slightly different way, but enough so that the second shot when placed alongside the first appears much harder than it probably really is. Particularly in the shot without any fill, the contrast ratio is just far to high and the level of the key is too high also. This is remedied somewhat with the introduction of fill light, but I would suggest to really recreate the look of the natural light, the key would need to be far more heavily diffused and/or moved further away from the subject. The second reason I think the mood of the shots don’t line up is perhaps slightly less relevant to the intention of the exercise but still worth bringing up nonetheless, and that is that the actual tint and colour temperature of the light sources don’t perfectly match each other. In the shot with natural light, the colour temperature appears somewhat cooler and there is a very slight green-cast in terms of the tint. Whereas in the shot in which we used a lamp (and later some fill bounced back in) the colour temperature seems a little warmer and the tint moves more towards magenta.