Lighting Experiment

Lighting is a very important aspect for shaping meaning in films, lighting creates the atmosphere of a scene for example if you want to create scary and mysterious scene you will need to think about your location, (i.e. a dark room) you need to place your lights in such a way to produce shadows where you want your light your subjects as you want them to appear. Using bottom lighting will enhance features as it creates terror and horror suitable for thriller sequences. You need to interrupt some of that light so it won't spill all over the room. You want to control where the light goes and where it doesn't go. The easiest way to do this is with large "flags" which are placed in front of your lights to create hard-edged shadows. 

For our task we tried to recreate a scene from the film 'Drive' starring Ryan Gosling where he is in a dark room looking out of a window and the light reflex's onto the dark window as he is standing there of his face and upper body; the only prop used is a lamp but, during the filming of that scene the cast crew would've used special light equipment such as back lighting, key lighting and fill lighting , as a class we tried to create that same scene using the lighting in the media and film office.


We  split the class up in half and worked all together to try and recreate the image shown in the opening scene of 'Drive' we used Ben to become our test subject of Ryan Gosling and sit down on a chair while we used low key lighting as it generally it only uses 2 of 3 lights on, one of the front lights is low or off the fill light is off back light may be off. We placed the key lighting around Ben and used flags placing a dark yellow/orange colour sheet over it to create the light for the lamp prop in the room; we didnt have a window to use as it was during the day and there was too much bright light coming through it , therefore we decided to use a mirror instead to create the same effect. This is our end result: