Link to Assignment 4 video:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-4ed2xmgnh9Wi2pHPulzUYX8TDsWGq2R
Assignment 4, much like the previous experiment we did, was a fairly pain-free production experience. Once again we shot the experiment fairly rapidly and with few issues, though this time we did have a new set of challenges to overcome. This time we wanted to experiment with lighting a car scene which would include some exterior shots as well as interior close ups. Compared to last time our lighting setups were much more complicated and required a larger degree of tweaking – because this time unlike the previous experiment we were aiming to create a whole scene – not just a single shot. We shot the whole scene with just three lights; a kino flo as our ‘key light’ positioned off to the left of the car and acting as a side-facing key and occasionally a backlight when our talent moved around, an Arri 1K positioned behind the car to act as a backlight that would create an edge around both actors, and finally a dedo to the back-right of the car that would both act as a secondary key for Jagger and a fill light for Angus (Jagger’s friend) in the front seat.
Though the lighting required a great deal of thought in preparation for this shoot and quite a bit of micromanagement on the day, the bigger challenge rather became about the coverage of the scene. We went into this with very little pre-production or planning. There was no script (we wrote it or improvised it on the spot), there was no shot list (I had a vague idea of the shots I wanted) and there was no storyboard. This lack of planning was definitely a detriment to the production stage (though we were still very efficient with our time). Had we planned out the shots and scripted the scene in a more concrete manner it definitely would have made life easier and probably given us more freedom to consider the aesthetic possibilities more thoroughly rather than spending so much energy coming up with the coverage on the fly.
Given the improvisational nature of the shoot, I am overall pretty happy with what we’ve been able to achieve (I’d say about 75% of it I’m really happy with). In particular I’m quite fond of the lighting we did for all the shots of Angus in the front seat. I think these all look really great and at least a couple of these will definitely be making their way onto my showreel. However I’m a little less pleased with some of the shots of Jagger in the backseat. Quite a few of them are out of focus (I’d just bought a wireless follow focus on the morning before the shoot and this was my first time using it – still got a few bugs to iron out!), but more to the point the lighting is a little bit flat. If I were to reshoot his shots I think I’d probably try to maneuver a cutter inside the car to make an attempt at creating some more shape on his face, and failing this I would simply have moved the Kino Flo to the back right window so that it would do more on Jagger for his close-ups (something which would have been easy to do but we simply didn’t unfortunately). This would also help with continuity a bit as well as I’m not entirely sold on the shots and reverse shots of the pair matching together seamlessly for this scene.
Again despite some elements I’m not altogether amazed by, I am overall really happy with how this experiment went and given that the intention was to learn how to light a car scene and to experiment with some different methods of achieving an intended effect, I think that once again the experiment has been a huge success.
P.S. for reference and inspiration we used a couple film scenes that we appreciate. These were car scenes from both ‘The Departed’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’ – both of which are embedded below to give an example of what we had set as a sort of ‘style guide’ for our scene, and which helped to inform our choices about not just the lighting but the different shots and coverage we opted for.