Lighting workshop

For today’s lesson, we learnt about how to apply lighting in shooting. To start with this topic, we talked about what is the director of photography(DOP): The chief over the camera and light crews working on production who is responsible for making artistic and technical desisions related to the images. The study and practice of this field is referred to as cinematography(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematographer)

Firstly, Matt introduced four types of light in the studio that have been used frequently. 

RedHead: Use for general purposes

Blonde light: bigger version of redhead, very strong light

Highlight: Relatively cold and tough light, need to adjust the White balance in the camera.

Fluorescent light 

The good thing is they look cool, the bad stuff is they are not dimmable, which means it is difficult to light the room up by using this light.

Matt showed us the way to set up lighting, for example, the most typical one: Three Redhead lights come from three different positions:

1.Key light/majority of the light hitting the object 

This create very sharp shadow on the face, which build up a sense of mysterious, however, it does not always look good in the general effect, so there is another light to fill the shadow.

2.Fill light: help fill in the shadow, making it doesn’t look mysterious 

3.Back light:edge light

Three lights positions

However, the light travel straight and hit the object, which give very sharp shadow. If we are trying to make the light softer, we could use a piece of paper to diffuse the light. The theory is, light hits the paper and force the light to go in different directions.👇

In order to reflect the light on figure’s face, any white surface material could be use, like white paper, white shirt, etc. Today, we used a huge board to show the principle of white bouncing the light away and light up the face.👇

When lots of shadow going on, polystyrene is used here, blonde light bounce off and gives a beautiful fill light. (Usually use for beauty shoots)👇

     Matte box: fits over the lens and stop all the extra light coming into the lens👇

     

In addition, transparent acetate with colours could be very useful in music video:

Red acetate 👇

Blue Acetate👇

Generally, lighting is one of the key elements that determine the effect of the scene. Before the light switch on, we should let people in the studio know, say to everybody “sparkling” so people don’t look straight on it. 

I think for our music video, we need mysterious lighting, because it’s rock music, we might going to use edge light.