So far this studio seems to be everything I was really hoping for it to be. As I’ve spent some time now working in the camera and lighting departments of many different shoots, I’ve slowly but surely developed the ability to assess and acknowledge the lighting conditions of a location or set and have spent a whole lot of time running around setting up lights for DP’s and gaffers. But through doing more of this it has occurred to me that a key skill set I am missing is the ability to take what I’m noticing about a space and then apply it directly to how I would light it. Constantly I will be on set and think I know how to setup the lighting configuration the DP has asked for, only for them to tweak it just slightly, but enough that it just takes the shot to that next level. That rare and difficult to achieve ability of getting a shot just right is really what I’m hoping to come a little closer to through this course.
The main revelation of this week for me was a simple one in regards to the difference between hard and soft lighting. At one point in class I commented on a film scene being soft lit, only to then be told by Robin that actually the light source was rather hard. Upon looking deeper into this it occurred to me that yes, the source was indeed hard – not soft. But really the DP seemed to have still created a soft look using this source regardless. This got me thinking about how a lot of the time the aesthetics of a film can come down to interpretation and also in large part context. I feel as though a light which is motivated in a scene (i.e. it is naturalistic) but still hard as a result will often feel less intense than a light that is used expressively (i.e. it is not necessarily motivated by something within the diegetic world of the screen). I suspect this rather complex concept is something that either myself individually or the class as a whole will look into in greater depth at a later date.
Reflecting upon exercise one I think the biggest thing I noticed was that I actually preferred part 1 (the shot in which no bounce or cutter was used), which I find interesting as I assumed that it would be the opposite way round. Looking at the second shot it is very apparent that I rushed it and probably didn’t pay close enough attention to what I was doing. Had I given it another moment to assess what the lighting I was using was doing (in this cause the bounce was placed to the right of frame) I might have realised that in doing this I was actually creating a ‘flatter image’ with far less contour and shape than the first part. The first image is lit with only the light coming through the four open windows – with the ‘key light’ in this instance being behind the camera and the ‘fill’ or ‘edge light’ coming from across the room to the left of frame. I actually think this creates a fairly flattering image, though if I were to repeat part 1 of the exercise I think I may have moved my subject across to camera left a little so that the key light wasn’t coming in quite so flat – and in doing so create a little more shape on the left side of the face (from the camera’s perspective).
Looking purely at exposure of the two shots I would say that again I am happy with the shot from part 1, and unhappy with part 2. The first shot I would deem to be ‘correctly exposed’ while the second I would say is somewhat significantly under – though probably not to the point that the information would be unrecoverable in post-production corrections.
As discussed in class there were some framing issues with this exercise across the board. I think that perhaps I am a little less guilty of this than some others – particularly looking at part 1, though even in this shot upon reflection I definitely would have cut out just a little bit of head room to avoid distracting the eye. For part 2 however I would certainly agree that the framing needed more thought put into it – the headroom is better but the frame overall feels far too cluttered. If I did part 2 of the exercise again I think I would consider framing in just a little tighter and panning the camera to the right just a touch, to cut out some of the distracting negative space that is created by how far to the right of frame the subject is placed.