Real life lighting Inspiration

When I am walking home late at night (10pm-12am) there are LED street lights, they release a hard white light that gives off an eerie setting. The light also only illuminates the specific space underneath it so between the lights is darkness that creates a sense of unknown danger and fear. Because the lighting don’t have the bank board the Kino Flo’s use they aren’t consistent in their illumination and tend to flicker. It is a dramatic use of lighting and would definitely be seen in a crime, film noir, horror or thriller genre based film. Every time I have walked down my street in the darkness of the night, inspiration burst with in my brain for a scene or a film idea.

Recently I had thoughts on a piece that focuses on the sexual harassment that women tend to face, I see a woman in her early twenties wearing a university jumper and shorts walking down the street fading in and out of darkness as she strolls under the lights listening to music. A car comes to a slower speed as the driver sees her, the woman becomes wary so she turns the corner to test the drivers motives and she sees they keep driving straight. But when she reaches the next corner the car speeds up to honk at her and when she turns to run a man is there to grabs her. She screams in shock but the man starts laughing, the windows wind down in the car and it is full of young men laughing along with him. It was all a prank and they leave the annoyed woman with whistles and cat calls, one of the men even slaps her butt as she walks off. After that the real horror begins.

Reflection of Exercise 3 & 7

What appears to be the main purpose of exercises 3 and 7 is to gain hands on experience in shooting and lighting an actual scripted scene. Time management is a large part of film production and that is mainly due to lighting. It is a very intricate and delicate process to fulfil a specific lighting requirement. Our group struggled with keeping with in the time limits, as our director and camera operator hadn’t had a chance to see the space of filming prior to shooting. Thus not being able to draw up a proper story board or plan for particular set ups. We had roughly planned our shots but it was basically all on site set ups as we didn’t foresee the furniture, window set up and also the light intensity.

Scene 6 was also a challenge as we shot mid-day, the sun was constantly moving and giving us creative constraints. We really did have to ‘think outside of the box’ to achieve the scripts requirements and not all were met as we were running on a short time limit. Despite all the issues I think we did fairly well in the end but need to pay attention to detail next time. The tasks were definitely relevant to the practical work and discussions we’ve had in class so far. I believe it is highly important to directly engage with the equipment as it is a fail to succeed lesson. Our classes have been teaching us about film lighting, how to use natural/technology based lighting, the emotion it gives plus the different styles and techniques.

I enjoyed taking part in exercises 3 and 7, practical work gives us lessons that can’t be taught in a class room, because we don’t learn buy only listening and watching but actually doing. We learn from each error we make and build up our knowledge with work we may actually do in our real life jobs one day. Editing is critical to success of a scene because you may have beautiful shots but the outcome can be terrible if edited inadequately. Viewing everyones edits was great because we learnt from each others mistakes and critiques.

Value in describing a painting as part of Assignment 1

The value of describing the lighting of a paining as part of assignment one was that artists are conveying a certain emotion through the lighting used in their paintings. Just like cinematographers, they are creating a image to be deconstructed by an audiences brain to convey a story and feeling. A paining just has a different technical process but none the less is specific in it’s creation.

 

Scene Analysis

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) – Bullet Farmer scene

Directed by George Miller

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOeAVncI7mQ

Comparison scene: Titanic (2017) – Jack’s Death scene

Directed by James Cameron

Cinematography by Russell Carpenter

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3pg27yqk3s

 

In this scene the heroes of the story have become trapped because one of their tyres has become stuck in a hole. Not far behind are the villains trying to catch them to attain the women they saved from a totalitarian leader who en-salved them. This is all based in a dystopian future.

They chose not to shoot at night because it would be too difficult with the vast amount of land as well as the extremely low temperature. Eric Whipp explains on his blog (Lowepost, 2016) that the Cinematographer, John Seale and VFX Supervisor, Andrew Jackson worked out a technique of shooting two stops over-exposed on the day shoot. Then is post Whipp used the program Colour Suit to turn the colour to cooler tones whilst also fixing the exposure, he also said he brought out detail in shadows with little to no noise being visable. This created the illusion that the scene is set during the night. You can see that the scene has been saturated in blue tones to create the illusion that it is dusk, the bright light imitating the sun may have been done with a Kino Flo light source acting at the key directed from the left side of the main actors. They would have had a large panel of white lights that the sun added too as it was shot in the middle of the African dessert.

The cinematographer had to have found a way to defuse the direct sunlight, if it were all natural the metal and actors would have intense glare and reflection beaming off their surfaces. The mass amount of smoke they added would have helped exposure, control of sun light and the night look they wanted to achieve. The key light is also reflecting of the ground and a fill light is used to light up the shots from the right. It is very strange that the scene is so vivid yet meant to be at night, only so much control can be taken under the circumstances in this case.

I also want to focus on when the antagonist has the bright red flare held up to his eyes, this is a memorable shot as they’ve edited the colour in post to create a hard almost neon red tone. They may have also used a LED to light up the actors from below to intensify the colour (with a red gel). A aesthetically calculated decision as the red symbolises evil, anger and danger from the antagonists, while the protagonists and their team are gleaming and covered in soft white spots. Almost as if there are glowing angels to represent innocence and justice. 

A scene that came to mind which uses similar lighting techniques and colour correction is ‘Jack’s Death’ in James Cameron’s 1997 film, Titanic. It may not have been shot in the day and turned to night but it was definitely not shot in the North Atlantic Ocean or in the ocean at all. The scene was shot on a set in a pool so the lighting is all technically executed and manipulated to represent that environment. Similar to Mad Max when I watched the behind the scenes footage I saw that the set lighting is quite warm and yellow but in the actual film it’s the “middle of the night”, cold and very blue. A similar technique is used in terms of colour correcting the warm tones and exposure to get the exact mood and colours the director is looking for. There are extremely wide shots. The scene does seem to follow classic Hollywood lighting (a key representing the moon, a fill and back light) unlike Mad Max with it’s unconventional and difficult circumstances. But there are extremely wide shots the team had to light and manipulate to get particular shadows and shine to imitate a dark vast icy ocean.

 

Whip. E. 2016. Lowepost, viewed on 23 March 2018.

https://lowepost.com/casestudies/mad-max-fury-road-r9/

Posted 8 April, 2012, ClaudBlog. Titanic 3D – Behind the Scenes Part 2, YouTube, viewed on 24 March 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkS5OR-Qfck&t=10s