Aalaa Ahmed
Duy Khuong
Yuhan Liang
Our purpose for Assignment 4 was to explore the use of lighting in different genres and how lighting speaks for a genre by decomposing and analyzing some lighting prototypes in representative films of their genres.
For Project 1, we recreated a scene from the famous Thriller film ‘Psycho’ by Alfred Hitchcock. The cinematographer, John L Russell, helped to create this masterpiece, indicative of the style which influenced modern Thriller films today. Through the process of making it, we acquired a more advanced comprehension of the different effects of lighting between B&W filters and colors. Though there were many compromises we had to make while recreating the scene, we believe that we remained true to the story and its aesthetics.
For Project 2, we created a scene using an original script. We intended to make something that contrasts the previous project, so we did this one in color. The scene sits in the genre of Sci-Fi, with aesthetic inspirations from ‘Blade Runner 2049’, ‘Her’ and ‘Ex-Machina’. We hoped to utilize blue and orange lighting to portray an intense conversation with a complex backstory while accentuating the opposing powers between the two characters.
Through the two projects, we progressively built our understanding around the role of lighting in different genres and also in filmmaking in general. We fulfilled our original proposal by supporting and challenging one another and we are proud of what we’ve accomplished in this course.