As we’re expanding our understanding of camera in regards to Dynamic Range and lighting for exposure. One of the things we’ve been looking at is an incidence light meter. We did an exercise where we lit a very simple scene and filmed it with available light in the room in building 13 but really took our time getting it right. Every single shadow was fussed over. The brightnesses of things on the monitor versus in the camera, making sure we exposed the shots properly.
Working as a class is good, good to see where everyone is at in their thinking. I think that for the most part lighting theory is vague though, relatively easy to write about, its very clear that lighting is a very obvious indicator of intent and a really solid way to stir a particular emotion, however, forming a solid contention around lighting conceptually is really hard. What I mean is, it’s quite easy to say “the hard lit scene has distinct shadows, and a bleached look which makes the scene feel hot and oppressive.” Yet, its very difficult to write, “the angle of the light portrays the character’s primary ideology as a self-indulgent narcissist.” This is a little bit frustrating also because lighting is so invariably nuanced and variable in any given film. Unlike camera which has a very obvious connection to the human psyche, gaze and perspective, lighting is a little more tangential to write about because it’s not a viewer’s surrogate, however without it, there would be nothing to shoot.
Where do we begin with a script in interpreting it with lighting. One of the first questions I have learned to ask is “What do we need to see?” which seems like fairly obvious question, however, of course, equally important and implicit is “What don’t we need to see?” and the answer to that is usually more important all together, because often, there are things that we do see that are useless and just distract from the scene entirely but you can’t always get rid of them with lighting, and this is a really important point.
As we presented our ideas for Assignment’s three and four, one of our guests was a Production Designer who made a lot of observations, all of which lined up with what Robin has been teaching us in the sense that, Production Design is really really important when it comes to mood and making sure it locks in with lighting. If the lighting needs to feel cold, so does the location, interestingly one of the things she said is that “it’s not about adding to the scene, it’s often about taking away.” Which sounds obvious, but in the scheme of things, a lot of the effort of production design is getting things and sourcing things to add to the scene when really, the removing of things that don’t match the cinematographer’s intentions is most likely just as powerful and just as effective.