Personal reflection – Floor plan for shoot 1

Below is the floorplan I considered for the lighting set up we undertook for our first exercise. As can be seen, there are three main light sources. The key light is composed of the LED light to the left of the setup, as well as the car headlights. The fill is taken care of by another LED panel set to a reduced luminosity seen at the top of the image. This very same LED panel ensured that the car (a light source in itself was not just a silhouette due to the bright light coming from its headlights.

In order to create the desired quality of light, we chose to use diffusion disks to soften the light coming from the LED panels. This created a much more pleasing highlight roll-off, as well as giving us a larger area of light to deal with. This was important as our characters had movement to perform so having a lighting set-up only apply to a small area of the set was not an option. It also further enabled us to reduce the luminosity of the lights.  Deciding the position and amount of smoke in respect to this floorplan was indeed a challenge. Although it was quite a still night, the smoke did indeed drift. This  meant that we needed to constantly reposition the smoke machine at various points during the shoot.

A surprise victory was how well the third light – a small LED panel – lit up the background of the scene taking place. As mentioned before, outdoor city scenes possess a lot of stray light from various buildings and streetlights. This small LED panel proved this effect in the background, making sure that the actors were not rendered in front of solid black.