lighting task reflection

This task of ‘lighting’ made me reflect a lot. I tried to shoot in different weathers to feel the difference of the lighting.  When I was shooting on a cloudy day, I felt that the footage was easy to become grey and blue, and giving a feeling of melancholy and sadness. When shooting on a sunny day, the yellow sunlight makes the footage warm and bright, which made the footage more colourful. Therefore, I realised that light is very important for the presentation of the scene, I think it can directly lead to the feeling of the whole film to the audience.

However, the lack of natural light can be improved with artificial lighting. I didn’t really use artificial lighting for this practice, I just used the flash of my iPhone to illuminate the face of the character and create different lit faces to observe. I found that the intensity of the light and the size of the area on the face will have different effects on the footage. When a large area of light is applied to the face, the lit face and the dark side do not form a strong contrast, and then will give the character a soft effect.

Here I am using 2 lights, one is a warm light as the fill light, another one is the iPhone flash as the key light.

When I used the light to illuminate the left face of the character, the contrast between the two sides shows a dramatic contrast, which makes people look horrific and harsh.

here I am only using the iPhone’s flash as the key light.

So I think the best situation a film shooting is using both natural and artificial lighting. As I’ve learned before, the basic and useful light setting of 3 point light would be suitable for most shooting scenes, with more practice I hope I can manipulate the light better in the future.

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