Lighting Techniques

From Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer Van Sijll

• Rembrandt lighting/chiaroscuro as influenced by Caravaggio paintings - high contrast
• Backlighting is often associated with moral goodness/mystical
• Disassociate objects/body parts
• TV lighting eg sitcoms is often thought of bright, flat and shadowless, although recent sitcoms such as Insecure have tried to break away from this
• Candlelight flatters the face, smoothes skin, adds a warm tone - can subvert this warmness
• Motivated lighting is light that would naturally exist in the world depicted in the frame
• Light traditionally is used to represent moral goodness, darkness as evil
• Flood of light having religious quality
• Moving Light can be created - can be an approaching antagonist, chaos + madness, some of them can be rescue etc

Notes from Cinematography: Theory and Practice

Image Making for Cinematographers and Directors

by Brian Brown

• p2 create a visual world for the characters to inhabit 
• p7 a long lens compresses space and a wide lens expands and distorts space
• p9 adding visual texture: changing colour and contrast, desaturating, filters, fog and smokefx, rain, film stocks
• p10 movies are one of the few art forms that use movement
• ability of the camera to conceal or reveal information
• letting camera reveal rather than narrator or dialogue
• POV is a key tool of visual storytelling - close to how one of the characters would see it
• cinematography consists of showing the audience what we want them to know about the story
• audience inhabits the characters brain and experiences what they experience

Camera movement

• Pull back retraction
• pull back reveal
• open up - revealing additional info
• close out eg Rebecca, blood diamond
• draw in
• draw out - start of close, out to wide, character remain in relation to each other
• spin around
• fly over
• depth dolly
• dolly up, dolly down
• spin look eg tombstone, after hours
• track through solid
• vertigo/dolly zoom
• expand dolly - actor moves faster than camera
• contract dolly
• collapse dolly - actor overtakes camera

Crane Techniques

Crane Up, move away
Crane down, move towards

Searching cranes - character searches, crane away reveals magnitude of search

Rise up - looking over an obstruction

Fall Down - look at something on the ground

Crane front to top - from full on to overhead

Crane up entrance

Crane up expression - emotional response - pyschological detachment, nature of life

Crane up look down

Crane down, look up - from full on to below

Health and Safety in the Studio

Sound:

• Notify director when doing line up tone
• everyone take off headsets and turn off speakers

Lighting:

• Avoid total darkness but switch off studio lights when not in use
• Use gloves when adjusting lights
• Safety gauzes in place
• No cables left dangling against light

General:

• No smoking, food or drink
• Never stand/put things on cables
• Don't cover electrical items
• when moving electrical equipment switch off from mains
• use circuit breakers
• don't let cables become tangled or tight
• When lifting keep your back straight and use leg power

Aspect Ratios

Standard Definition

SD 4:3 - 720 x 576 non-square pixels
Pillar box
can be made 16:9 by using an anamorphic lens

High Definition

16:9
720p HD frame 1080 x 720
Full HD Frame 1920 x 1080
Letter box

Quad HD = 3840x2160

2k = 2048x1080

4k = 4096x2160

Working with Lighting

Health and Safety:

Always use gloves

  Keep away from curtains and furniture

  Allow 20 mins cool-down time

Always use RCD (trip switch) 

  Always extend any cable coiling to avoid

  overheating from electrical induction (to prevent   potential melting of cabling)

  Don’t overload circuits, esp. in non-studio locations 

 Don’t touch new bulbs with fingers when changing light   bulb

Tape down all cables across throughways

  Carefully adjust sturdiness of lamp stands

  Rain!

  Wind – use sandbags to weigh down lamps 

White Balance

Cameras must be set to recognise a certain colour temperature as neutral white.  This is known as adjusting the white balance.

White light is made up of the full spectrum of these wavelengths, but different proportions of combinations of this spectrum will produce different‘tones’of white, although our eye will adjust to them and just see ‘white’.

To adjust the white-balance

•Get in manual mode

•Go to memory A or B

•Focus on a white surface (full frame) with correct exposition

•Hold AWB button until AWB OK is displayed

•The principal two are photographic daylight (usually thought of as 5600 K) and tungsten (3200 K).

•However, daylight can vary from 2000 K at sunrise to 7000 K on an overcast day.

Wide vs Narrow-angle Lens

Wide angle Lens:

1. Takes in large segment of scene
2. can distort picture
3. space, distance and depth are exaggerated
4. camera handling and focusing are easy

Narrow Angle Lens:

1. Small segment of scene in shot
2. Narrowest angles can give blow up telescopic image
3. Space, distance and depth are compressed
4. Camera handling and focusing harder