2013 Media Language - Lighting 3.1 (Source & Colour)

In this photograph of the film Forrest Gump there is a clear lighting that has been used to create the time of day, for example light can be used to make the scene look as if it has been filmed at a different type of day to create shadows that block out light. Shadows are areas that are created because direct light cannot reach that area. The most common natural light is the sun and when the sun is shining it cannot shine through objects so this object will create shadows. The size of the shadow depends on a variety of factors including the time of the day, the size of the object blocking the light and the position of the sun at the time the shadow is created.

I have used this picture to demonstrate how lighting can be used to highlight shadows and how lighting can be used create a time of day. This is the same shot used in the example photograph above and in this shot it shows the light a lot dimmer but in the back ground you can see a highlighted area where the sun is visible. This tells us the time of day would be when the sun is most high up in the sky as there are beams of lights being produced in the background of the image, also when this light is up high then this means shadows from objects must point down and light coming from straight on flattens the image.

This image shows a Kelvin lighting scale and on this scale it shows lighting temperatures for different types of day. The higher the reading on the scale then the less warm the day is, for example if the scale has a reading of 8,000K then this means that the lighting will be sky blue and the lower the reading then the more warm the temperature of the light will be, 1,000K replicating a candle.

Lighting created can also come from inside a set design that has been made to look  as if it is a natural set up. Designs like this can be made to look as if they are outside by being designed like this so they are not filming reality. This makes it easier for the Cinema photographers to create the style of lighting that they want as there is no sun creating soft or hard shadows.


"such as visual sources of light, however, will serve to motivate the lighting desisions made in production. The film maker will usually strive to create a lighting design that is consistent with the source in the setting"

2013 Post 12: Media Language Lighting 2 (Quality & Direction)

In this post I will be explaining how I carried out my quality and direction experiment, there are many stages that we followed and in the end we gained experience with how to use different styles of lighting to create different effects that we will may use when creating our film. In our group we decided what lighting source were were going to use, for example the light we chose to use was a Fresnel Lantern as we thought that this was most suitable to use when trying to highlight features on a characters face. This lighting source we used was most suitable as we could change the direction of the lighting by using the barn doors on the side of the light. The light used was a simple mechanism that features a on and off button on the back of the light, when using the light we made sure that the switch was turned off as the bulb could easily blow as the velocity of the light is very high. When using the lighting we had to wear heat proof gloves as the bulb of the light got to a very high temperature. The effect that we wanted to create when using our lighting was to use soft and hard lighting to highlight visual emotions on a characters face, and it is our choice if we want to use this lighting style in our film or not.

When holding out this experiment we used a Sony video camera to record our actions taken to create this experiment. After we had set up the lighting that we needed to use we recorded the experiment from a direct angle to see what effects had been created from using the barn doors on the light. When using the light I volunteered to be the charachter that the light would be used on, in this video it shows how the barn doors have been moved to change the direction of the lighting creating soft and ahrd shadows to create emotion. This effect also highlights important aspects of a short film making it easier for viewers to understand who the main characters are.

Predictions

In our group we thought many effects would be created when using the lighting and we thought that the light being created would be too hard for our film as it would look too dark to use. The main thing that I noticed when using the light was the effects that could be changed when adjusting the barn doors, for example the lighting as one stage was very dark and hard, but as soon as we opened the barn doors to allow more beams of light for a wider angle a softer light we created. This was very helpful towards my learning as I didn’t know how some effects could be changed when adjusting the barn doors on the light used. The light also highlighted areas that I didn’t think it would be possible to highlight, for example under the eyes and below the nose get highlighted the most when using a Fresnel Lantern and I did not think that this would happen. I thought the most highlighted areas would be the whole face in general but the beams of light highlight emotions and key features when directed to do this.

 

The strenghts of the experiment are shown in the video, our groups understanding of how light can highlight 

important features has developed and we can now use this lighting when needed to be used in our film. If we want to show emotion on our character Alans face we can now create a hard or soft lighting to highlight importance and emotions.