Lighting Tutorial

To prepare us for creating our documentaries, Anne held a tutorial to teach us about lighting. We went into our groups and discussed the importance of lighting and what it can do for a scene. I wrote that lighting can be used for composition to bring attention to certain characters or parts of the scene (e.g spotlights, controlled direction of light). Lighting sets the mood of the scene; a darker, low key lighting can be used to create an eerie setting. In contrast, a use of bright lighting can create a happy scene. The use of light can also depict the time of day, create a film style (e.g film noir) and show emotion through shadows. We were told to think about certain things when looking at lighting these including:

• Is the light hard or soft?
• What is the direction of the light?
• How intense is the light?
• What is the colour temperature of the scene?
• Where is the light source?

We also went over high key and low key lighting. High key where light comes from a high place with less shadows creating a brighter, happy, positive mood and Low key where the light creates lots of shadow in the scene making it eerie and mysterious. Low key lighting is usually used in horror movies, thrillers and film noir to create the mood and high key is often used in comedies and family movies for a happy, friendly feel.

Vittorio Storato ~ 'The Conformist'

In our production groups we each were given a picture of a scene to look at and discuss the lighting in the scene. My group was given this scene from The Conformist to look at and this is what we thought: We decided that this picture used low key lighting and low contrast to create this scene. There's a non-theatrical, natural style of light coming through the windows and no practical lighting which we believed gave the impression of the sun setting, when its at the lower point in the sky. The lighting is quite soft as you can see the edges of the light are not defined and the cool tones give a dark and mysterious impression to the scene. 

We were then given a chance to try out some low key lighting techniques for ourselves. My group joined with another and we created a small poker scene using a table and a practical light. We put the light just around eye level so you could only see the table and characters if they leaned in. This created vast amounts of shadow in the picture and fits the scene perfectly. We filmed a very short scene in which the participants gather round the table and the dealer deals out cards to each of them. The scene was not story based it was just a short activity to exercise what we had learnt about lighting. Overall I think ours was very effective and worked well.