In this week’s class we had to manipulate a lamp light, because what the eye sees is different from what the camera picks up. The lamp that was chosen had a very warm temperature. This might be random, but when I look at warm things it just reminds me of the golden hour time, giving off a soft vibrant look. I feel like it’s one of the best times during the day to shoot and film. To be honest I felt like we did not achieve the look the lamp gives off, it was quite hard to manipulate that kind of lighting. Just the tone of the lighting and how bright it was, it just looked off. Plus the direction of where the light was placed was a bit off, it wasn’t angular like how the lamp light looked.It’s understandable that you would need a fill light to manipulate the light because it’s different from the camera to the naked eye. If we were to try this out again i feel like using a dedo light would have been more suitable.This kind of low lighting would be suitable for projects like short stories, I would wish for the lamp to be more vibrant with colour and have cut out shapes around the cone (i’m thinking of a child short story). This demonstrates the difficulties that come with trying to manipulate lighting because they’re so many factors to consider and once a light is placed a specific other problems arise. If you place light equipment in a position, you have to think about where’s its shining and what looks unnatural or what you need to fill or cut out with boards.
I recently watched a trailer called ‘Birds of Prey’ starring Margot Robbie. A lot of the lighting in the clip inspired me for my final project, it’s set in low lighting with a lot of dual lighting of colours. There is something with the lights that draw me in, how colourful it looks, it makes the scene more aesthetically pleasing. This makes me wonder how the lighting would be executed, like how many keys lights used, any filter or what types of lights were used. The trailer gives off a very night life look. It is very colourful and it made me think about the key lights, fill lights used to achieve this kind of look. What I loved about the trailer was how much types of lighting used to create a different mood and enhance the scene. There was a lot of warm, soft tones during the day time scenes, whereas at night it was cooler and the shadows were more prominent and dark. Something i noticed that the scenes are filmed with quite a bit of hard shadows. I think these scenes were 100% all artificial and they were quite creative with the kind of lighting. These scenes allowed me to think about coloured lighting in a different way, for our final projects we wanted to move away from using dual lighting for the looks or for it to be aesthetically pleasing. I guess the character Harley Quinn is known for being in trouble and her nightlife, so the lighting used in her scenes would further enhance her scenes and set the mood. She’s a very colourful characters with many moods and reactions, saying this throughout the clips it is filled with dual lighting and warm. Overall i felt like the lighting matches the personality of Harley Quinn (If that makes sense), its vibrant, moody and colourful.
When it comes to lighting an important aspect to consider is correctly exposing lighting. Correct exposure is changing the f-stop, shutter speed and scene luminance to light up a scene. I occasionally take portraits as a hobby for fun and I recently went to a photoshoot and thought of the things I learned in class this week. The location was a very nice vintage house, it looked like it straight out came from a movie. The thing was that there was no natural lighting whatsoever, the place was so big things were blocking the natural light from coming in. So the only light available to use was the house lamps and my small light stick to light up the model’s face. While taking the photos i did notice how warm the photos would be, but when i finally imported to my laptop to edit, it was completely orange. I did not realise how orange it would be, it made me realise how unpredictable it is, to view how the photos look like by looking at the viewfinder. The good thing with photos are that they are easier to edit on programs such as Lightroom, so I easily fixed the problem with lowering my white balance to the cooler/blue side of the spectrum.I noticed how my light stick made such a difference even though it was only 40cm long, it did give my model some exposure and when it came to editing she was lit in a bit of luminance rather than blending in with the background. I also tried to work around different lighting sources, I placed my model near a table lamp to have her face lit. Overall, I really enjoyed photographing at the place, I wished I would have bought more (get access to) lighting equipment to properly exposure the place because there was legitimately no natural lighting. Also, I really wished I had a light meter to measure the luminance coming from the scene because if i had whipped out a light meter i could have calculated the settings to put on my camera, rather than manually changing the shutter speed or iso (i only change those two and not my aperture because I always leave my f/stop on 1.8 for photos) to see how my photos looked like, there was a lot of trial and error before I had a ‘correct’ exposure. Even though photography and film are quite different, I feel like the settings are the elements that bring them together.
Joey, Tully did an amazing job with their presentation, they played around with key lighting having it create a nice, correctly exposed, clean silhouette. The great thing about their experimentations was that Tully’s figure was sharp black. I really like how the group presented their footage, for each shot they provided the f-stop, shutter speed, exposure etc, they were very organised and detailed. Also the location that was chosen gave the group full advantage of properly exploring light without any external lighting. The dark room looks like a great place to film at and play around with lighting. The silhouettes were so amazing they were sharp, dark and made such a cool effect. My group and I were trying to actually achieve this kind of look, but we did not manage to get the right look, due to the location there was a lot of external light coming in. I thought that the group was very prepared and did a very good job presenting their experiments, they were very organised with shots, had a nice suitable location to fully play around with the lighting. I think these techniques shot during the experiment would be great for creative uses such as a music video or photography, it’s quite subjective and abstract. Something i picked up right away from the presentation was the equipment used, my teammates and I just borrowed a camera and two dedo lights, i do not think that was enough to execute out what we had in mind. I feel like if we had the actual right equipment and a low light room, we would have achieved what we wanted right away.
While filming our final assignment, one thing I noticed right away is how we should of been more organised with our filming schedule. Things happened suddenly and we had to push it to the final week, saying that i still think my group did a great job. We had some obstacles to overcome such as borrowing the equipment, we were told to book the equipment, we tried to book the dark room but it was not available. We had to scout for locations and lucky found a cinema room to film in and we were not bombarded with a class from 9 to 12, we’re so lucky!
When we were preparing and setting up the equipment, we had some difficulties with the lighting, it was a bit off with the dedo lights and our 1k light. We decided to choose the colours pink and blue, something different from our pitch well it suited more (orange and blue). We had to fold our gels for a more saturated looks and place across the dedo lights on the same angle pointing to the centre of the board. When we first lit up the 1k light it was too bright and overpowered both of the dedo lights, so we had to add a filter and lower the brightness so the key light would just light up Teresa’s face correctly.
We were quite stekical at the start because our set up was different from what we imagined, but when we were happy with the lighting and started filming, it actually didn’t look that bad and i loved the shots that were filmed by Conor. I loved the shot of the mist bottle and the lipstick where the two colours were split symmetrical. We had our camera settings at f/8.
We decided to film our footage with both a tripod and handheld. I feel like the hand held looks gives off a different vibe and i like it (I know you don’t like it robin sorry!)
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1umvVlbJsuwhSief7dImmPJRGrlxCuUkU
Teresa: Experienced Model
Conor: Camera Person
Julie: Editor
For our pitch video we had two ideas, which were either play around with the glow effect with the silhouette inspired by horror/thriller/noir films or play with dual lighting. Executing the glow effect was particularly hard because the key light was too small, we only had dedo lights on set. This was probably a mistake we should have bought more lights like a 1k light to fully experiment. We did not have a proper location to film, we had to walk around buildings to find a room, we found a vacant room, but there was light from the outside which ultimately did affected how things looked in the videos.
The thing was struggling with the most was the placement of the dedo lights, what we filmed was having a subject in the centre of the line of the wall and shined the coloured dedo lights on the side. Since we filmed from the window/door, it let some natural light in and affected the colours also the light was very circular, if that makes sense while the orange was evenly spread on the wall the blue was just a circle.
One thing to reflect on was the purpose of experimenting with this, we had chose this for the look/aesthetics, we wanted to find a purpose to play around with the colours
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qp738s32kS-XDYk-btP-3zIiS_fFnHbY