Doing Film Light kind of takes me back to when I first started to think about lighting in films. It was when I was filming my first couple of short videos in high school. Watching films never really had me thinking about how lighting was done, but when it came to making my own stuff, I found out that lighting took up a huge portion of it.
I remember realizing the amount of work that had to be done to achieve the ideal lighting and thinking, for the first time, that film-making was hard. At that time I had no knowledge about any lighting techniques so I simply set things up based on my intuition for what would look nice and cinematic. Looking back at the videos I made now with the knowledge I’ve learned in Film Light so far, I find it incredible that I sort of figured out three-point lighting myself but like definitely did not do it correctly. Here’re vids.
https://youtu.be/nlaebPN-su0
https://youtu.be/eIE05H7e5mc
Looking at them now I think the lighting could’ve been manipulated better to convey the atmosphere with greater depths.
In week 2’s first class we experimented on filming interviews with natural lighting and bounce boards. I’d never seen a black bounce board before and was kind of shocked to know that it could absorb light to reduce the amount of lighting reflecting onto the subject’s face (I mean I’ve learned in Physics that color black absorbs light but I just didn’t make that connection). With the interview I did with Dan, it could be observed that when a white bounce board held at the side of him, his face became more filled and the key to fill ratio went down, making his face less contrasted. The application of a black bounce board didn’t make much of a difference, it could explained that the white walls are reflecting the light from all angles onto his face and blocking one direction of light made too minute a difference to see.
We’re also introduced to 3 types of lights with different wattages and how the quality of their outputs are different.
An 800W (red head) light casts strong lighting that makes the subject’s face looks highly contrasted. The edge of the lighting looks sharp.
A 1000W (blue head) light casts strong lighting that makes the subject’s face look relatively softer and the edge of the lighting looks blurred due to its fresnel lens.
A Dedo light (150W) is much smaller in size and output capacity, is usually used as back light.