FILM LIGHT | Presentation Reflection | Noah Hodgson

The presentation day for Assignment 3 was a really enjoyable experience for me. It was good in particular to see that each group had chosen a very different element of film lighting to experiment with, to differing degrees of success – yet all interesting and informative in their own way. The presentation that I probably got the most out of was Joseph, Terrance and Tully’s silhouette experiment. I think this group did a really great job of taking an in depth look at a very specific lighting effect, and very clearly showed that with each lighting setup they did they were experimenting and learning and adjusting their approach to the next shot accordingly. I was particularly impressed to learn that they did all of this using the frankly pretty terrible cameras we have been using in class throughout the studio – with their terrible dynamic range, digital noise and all. The second shot in particular I thought was honestly really cool. I liked in particular how they had allowed just the right amount of light to wrap around their subjects chin so that you could make out the humanoid shape and the allusion of a face, but not so much that you could see any facial details. This created this really interesting faceless effect which almost looks like something you’d see as a villain in a Doctor Who episode or something along those lines. I also liked the dual-tone colouring of it, with there being a warmer colour temperature light illuminating one side of the face and a cooler one the other – it’s almost close to the sort of ‘orange and teal’ look which has become very popular in a lot of hollywood action movies (John Wick for example). This dual-tonality actually got me thinking about ideas for some lighting experiments I’d like to do myself at some point regarding lighting a scene where you would have one source replicating a sort of rainy day coming in through the window and a second source being a warmer interior light – but that’s an idea for another day (and mostly unrelated to this experiment but it got me thinking so I figured I’d mention it). If anything I think that this group could have gone further with this experiment and maybe experimented with different levels of silhouette – ranging from something that is more ‘standard’ looking but heavily backlit, and moving back towards the more extreme silhouettes that they displayed in their presentation (but of course this isn’t necessarily what they were going for – just probably what I would have done if it were me doing this kind of experiment).