During this week’s Tuesday class, we were given the opportunity to direct a small shoot in an area of our interest. Although a lot of the class seemed to opt for more narrative style and dialogue driven experiments, I mainly just wanted to play around with lighting.

I had a rough idea of the particular set ups that I wanted to film, but I mainly planned on just manipulating and maneuvering the light source around on the day and seeing what we ended up with. One of the main problems we found ourselves with was finding a dark enough area to shoot in, which would ensure that the light we were using was the main lighting source, rather than daylight or the ceiling lights in a classroom. We ended up down in the edit suites, as it’s usually pretty dark in that area, however, we discovered that all of the lighting within the suites are automatically turned on when movement is sensed. We ended up finding a small, darker corner of the room, yet this limited us to only really being able to light Jess from the front. We had literally backed ourselves into a corner, which meant that we couldn’t really do much in terms of back lighting, or lighting Jess from a distance.

Despite these difficulties, I think that the rest of the shoot went relatively well, and that we were still able to get a variety of different looks, which each made Jess’s facial features look moderately different from shot to shot. Most of these looks, due to the small space we were in, are fairly dramatic, so I would like to possibly find a better location to re-shoot with more natural effects in the future. A bit more pre-production planning would also help if I were to complete this task again, especially when it comes to finding an appropriate space to shoot in, as well as some preconceived ideas of how I want the lighting to look. This way, I would be changing the lighting in order to achieve a set result, rather than just moving it around, hoping to find something that looked interesting. Finding some frames of unique lighting in films that I like, and bringing them along to the shoot may aid in this process.

One of my main goals of this task was to simply get my hands on a piece of equipment that I hadn’t used before, so learning what worked best for the light that we had, and how to set it up was also a valuable experience. Although other members of the group were in charge of editing the footage together, I did ask them to make the shots black and white. I felt this ensured that attention is primarily given to the actual change in lighting, rather than the changes in colouring that occurred when the light source was moved closer or farther away from the subject.

Please see below the final outcome of the shoot.