Link to Assignment 3 video:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FJgCP6IaJNyk0dnz–9sdqhUK53KL1Gs
Despite a few initial setbacks regarding our shooting location, the production of this assignment was a pretty pain-free activity. The task that Jagger set for us for this assignment was to try to create as many ‘cinematic’ looks as we could using only a single light source (an Arri 2K Fresnel + gels and diffusion) and a single cutter and bounce. We then extended this concept to trying to replicate some looks from a few films that we found to be inspiring or exciting in some way, which gave us some direction in how we could approach the experiment. Given the limitations of the challenge we set ourselves and the fact that we got through four different lighting setups in only a little over two hours, I am all-in-all very pleased with the results of this experiment.
It was great to be able to take some of the concepts we’ve been learning in class and apply it directly to film lighting practice – and especially to do so with limited gear (something I’ve found to be a common occurrence on lower budget shoots – though perhaps not to this extent). I also think that the four film excerpts we chose (Lost in Translation, It, Her and Arrival) were sufficiently distinct and each came with their own set of challenges so that we could fully explore the challenge we had set ourselves.
For the ‘Lost In Translation’ shot, the biggest challenge I found with lighting was matching the tonality of the film. The film excerpt is extremely soft and naturalistic looking, with a lot of motivated ambient light, so achieving this with a single source was certainly difficult to say the least. The film looks as though it was probably top lit through a large diffusion screen and then heavily filled front onto Scarlet Johansson’s face. For our version of this we couldn’t really find a way to top light it in the same way (my lounge room doesn’t have a very high roof), so we put the light as high as we could and filled it back as best we could to try to create an even exposure across the whole face. We weren’t totally successful in recreating the look of the film, but it is definitely on the right track. Our version has a bit of an exposure differential look from the right side of the face to the left, something which if we weren’t trying to replicate a specific look would be absolutely fine (and I think in isolation the shot we’ve taken is quite good and professional looking), but given that we were going for a direct reproduction of the shot from the film I think the end result is almost there but not quite.
The shot from ‘It’ was challenging in an entirely different way. For this shot we were replicating a shot which I believe is quite heavily reliant on SFX makeup and VFX for the eyes (and as was pointed out in the presentation may not have looked anything like the finished product in-camera). We tried to replicate this look by half-cutting the 2K to create a shadow over the top half of my face and then positioning a bounce at my chest to bounce light back up into my eyes to at least try and replicate the look of the film. I think in the case of this shot we’re halfway there – and maybe if we had the same makeup and VFX budget we could have made this shot extremely close if not identical to the original. But as it stands it’s just not quite there. I think that the shadow cast over my face is almost perfect but the shot really just isn’t the same without those eyes. As we discussed in the presentation it may have been interesting (if we weren’t trying to do this with a single light) to potentially use a mirror to try to shoot a very small light directly onto my eyes – though given the parameters of the experiment I think we’ve done an admirable job of recreating the original shot.
Our recreation of Her is frustratingly close but again just not quite there. Much like the shot from ‘Lost in Translation’ – if we weren’t trying to perform a direct translation of the original shot, then what we have created would be perfectly acceptable and I think it looks pretty good in isolation. We created this look by positioning the lamp to Jagger’s back, placing a cutter to his left to reduce spill coming from the room itself and create more shape and then placing a bounce directly in front of him to replicate the heavily filled original shot. The only thing that lets this replication down is the position of the 2K; if it were only just a little more direct onto Jagger’s back I think the replication may have been almost perfect – in our version the light wraps around Jagger’s left, whereas in the film it appears to very slightly favour the right of Joaquin Phoenix.
Our version of Arrival is the one that I think is probably the closest to the film version (in a bootleg, low-budget kind of way). Of course again the reference frame from the film is a VFX shot so we couldn’t perfectly recreate it, though I think our method of using Jagger’s hands to cast a shadow onto the sheet of diffusion we used as a backdrop is pretty effective at replicating even this (even if it does look a little goofy). For this shot we essentially just shot the 2K through a full CTB gel and a sheet of diffusion, past Jagger’s hands and then onto another sheet of diffusion, all of which worked to illuminate Eleanor’s silhouette. This shot took a bit of finessing to get right – through trial and error we had to adjust the distance of the lamp from the diffusion screen backdrop, add a layer of diffusion on the lamp head to spread the light and remove a hotspot from the backdrop diffusion and also control Eleanor’s proximity to this backdrop to first and foremost get a wide enough frame without going outside the bounds of the very small sheet of diffusion and also to control the amount of light that would wrap around Eleanor and effectively how sharp the silhouette would be. The end result speaks for itself though I think – this shot out of all the ones we filmed is the closest to the reference shot we were going for.
Despite me being somewhat hyper-critical of my own work, I am legitimately pleased with the results of this experiment and despite some of them being closer to what we were going for than others, I do think that each of them in isolation (maybe with the exception of our version of ‘It’) could definitely be applied to a legitimate film or TV production fairly seamlessly with the help of some costuming and production design!