Lighting Workshop

To help with our final piece, our teacher gave us a session on different lighting techniques, how to make them and what they connote.

Soft front light / hot backlight

This technique uses the soft light as a fill light the backlight as a backlight. Sometimes leaving a shadow on the person's face for example, can connote a sense of sincerity and create a gravitas mood. For a slightly different look, the backlight can also be soft, but it should still be hotter than the fill. When you move the camera the lightening should be moved as well to make sure the subject is always correctly lit. This means a lot of filming takes place with the lighting set-up rather than shot sequence.

To create this technique in our own example we used these lighting:

Ambient Light

Candles

Mixing color temperatures

Mixing colours can help create complex moods and set motifs, such as in terminator when the use of red and blue lighting was commonly used on terminator's face. 

To create this effect we used this equipment:

Filtered Light

Candles

Chiaroscuro

Chiraoscuro originally began as an oil painting technique that uses strong contrasts between light and dark to create a dramatic effect. Leonardo Da Vinci is credited as one of the artists to begin this technique. 

To create this technique we used this equipment:

Candles

Obviously our use of lighting depends on our genre, and for dramas, verisimilitude is the aim, so we will likely just use ambient/natural lighting in our piece.