Planning - Lighting

Lighting:

We used a popular technique in film lighting, a soft (diffuse) light source from the front and a stronger, more directional light from the back, so that are subject had a hot edge. The soft frontal light is known as the fill light; the strong light at the back is known, unsurprisingly, as the backlight.

we arranged the lights in such a way as to leave darkness between the area illuminated by the backlight and the area illuminated by the fill light. This worked very well, although even the moodiest films tend to avoid leaving dark shadows on the faces of female characters.

For a slightly different look, the backlight can also be soft, but it should still be hotter than the fill.

we lit our film or video shot by shot. This meant that when we moved the camera to shoot a different angle and the lights were moved as well to ensure the subject way always lit correctly. This is partly why the trailer took so long to shoot.

Setting up lights was the most time-consuming task in film shoots. It is therefore good practice to shoot a scene in such a way as to minimize the need to relocate lights – in other words, shoot in the order of the lighting set-ups.

We also used lights of different color temperatures to great effect. This simply means using lights of a different color in the same shot.