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

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 

Cinematography Quotes

 Vilmos Zsigmond

• in 2d you have to create the depth
• film noir type lighting that is a hard direct light source
• when the camera is shaking all over the place you cannot forget you are watching a movie
• seldom have arguments with directors because im trying to shoot their ideas not mine

Christopher Doyle

• th cinematographer/camera operator is the closest person to the actor
• the bridge, the conduit between the audience and what's in front of the camera
• gives resonance to the image
• have to be transparent and remove ourselves enough so that the passage between the actors and the audience is direct
• if you are working with digital etc, the energy and the challenge comes from the peculiarities of the medium not from trying to replicate film
• inform myself and the audience through visual experience and enhance it or suggest another visual experience
• 'is that all you can do?'
• I have used green moonlight in many of my films
• Art is supposed to transcend the mundane, the accepted, not condescend to it
• being an outsider is useful
• camera people not directors of cinematography

Michael Ballhaus

• Anything you can think, you can also do. Sometimes it takes a little longer, or it takes a little mor money but you can do it
• you can't move the camera in a comedy as much as you can in a drama because the timing is too important
• a bulb is a constant light but a candle flickers
• right tone between seeing enough and not too much
• every movie I do should look different

James Wong Howe

• There's one thing a light meter can not tell you, and that's whether it's the right mood or not

Ed Lachman

• painters always came from a certain personal, social and political position - you could come from a certain idea about an image rather than just trying to make it look aesthetically beautiful
• dadaism and the found image in art
• use of colour to create emotions rather than pictorial representation
• how different light sources mixed or individually create a mood through the different colour tempuratures
• What will tell the poetic or pyschological truth of an image
• images are metaphors to uncover something - helping reach interior
• you can deal with reality as the illusion and you can create your illusion as reality

Rodrigo Pieto

• I go to photography books - how could I present that visually
• Oliver Stone expects his team to propose concepts
• I do my own shot list before  I talk to the director
• I try to have the camera move as if the scene's energy makes it move
• I don't think 'good' photography is always 'beautiful' photography
• images holud just be what moves you and what will support the story

Caleb Deshcanel

• You start the movie and you finish it
• sometimes I like the chanllenge of something not being overtly visual
• visual style that tells story -repeating elements, something new
• It's really like music - it has different movements
• I like to take every scene and think about what's important
• bring an emotional context from a visual point of view
• become a real observer and  develop an understanding of human behaviour

Raoul Coutard

• I think that a film is good when you come out of the cinema totally stunned

Vittorio Storaro

• Cinema is a language of image
• a cinematographer has to design and write the story starting at the beginning, through the evolution to the end

Chris Menges

• operating a camera with ground glass you see and beleive
• you have to be driven but you also have to listen

Dion Beebe

• people have to be able to invest a lpt of confidence in your ability
• prepare thoroughly for each job
• relationships you develop for your crew
• no should never be an option
• the idea is key and having blue sky moments liberates those ideas
• create an atmosphere of trust

Jack Cardiff

Owen Roizman