Practicing Lighting Set Up

Today was a great day, I had arranged to borrow a number of light gels and some camera equipment to have one more practice with, I know this would either make or break my short film as it has to achieve the correct level of authenticity.  My main concern when it came to lighting was the basement. Everywhere else I wanted to use natural lighting, however in the basement I had to turn off the lights considering they are fluorescence lights and gave off a distinctive buzzing sound.

I had a brief one to one with Graham (new tutor for university), I brought in some of the reccy pictures to show him, he pointed out some areas would need gels in places I never expected. I trust his judgment and experimented in these areas, the main concern was the kitchen lighting. There are many lights in the kitchen but the ones which could cause concern was the floor lighting as if not dimmed down properly could have a drastic effect to the camera.

Lewis Johnson once again joined me at the location and helped me set up as his role consists of lighting and sound. We focused on recreating the basement first as I believe it is the main scenes which will entertain the audience overall, after a brief discussion with Lewis we realised that we had to use orange gels as they were the only ones available to suit the “light source” in the basement. Originally I wanted to use a single portable lantern which I had in mind, if I was to use it I would have placed it hanging from the ceiling on a hook so that it would give the illusion that the lantern was the only “light source” there, unfortunately the lantern I had in mind was badly damaged and the second lantern was an electric lantern which I believe takes away some of the desperate atmosphere of “Tom’s” and “Luke’s” situation. So instead we decided a couple of candles positioned on both sides and centre of the room. By using candles I would have to use a bright colour such as orange to which in editing can be adjusted enough to seem authentic to the audience. On set the cast and crew may find it disorientating but I believe the main concern is to light the room enough to show the characters face’s and actions with a lot of darkness around to create the seriousness of the situation.

Due to amount of room we had in the basement we could only close off a section of the room to set up lighting equipment. From the shots we predict to get, the best option was to close off the left side of the basement for the lighting equipment. We had many pieces of lighting equipment but we decided to use one redhead light, as it is a small room and we don’t want to over light the set.  Once that was set up we had a look at lighting through the camera to see how different it is, it was good in some areas but the section where the character Luke would be positioned looked neglected, so we played around a bit more and repositioned the redhead light to suit all the area but it didn’t help, we then went on to work on the box lights. It was suggested to me previously to put blue gels over the box lights and position them in the exposed areas of the ceiling as it would give the impression of natural daylight and add to atmosphere of cold and depressing but whilst trying this out, we realised that it seemed thrown in and only ruined the illusion of the drama. Instead of discarding the box lights I tried to see if it would help light Luke’s area any more with orange gel over it and it did, we had to hide the box lighting behind a couple of nails boxes but it adds to the illusion of the candles creating the light.

For the light sources we had to double layer the orange gel to make it duller and one layer of diffusion paper on top. Below are some screen grabs from our recording. I am aware some are darker than required but I predict they will be cleaned up in the editing process.