Lighting Workshop

Last week our class was able to learn about lighting with Fergus.

He showed us about 3 point lighting and how to use the lighting on creating atmospheres, etc.

Three-point lighting is a method used in video, film and photograph, by using three separate lights in different positions, so that the photographer, etc can light up the subject (person you filming or taking a photo of) as well as controlling the shading and shadows produced by the main light.

Our group was given a task to complete a couple of film noir style using lighting and filming a couple of seconds of it. I teamed up with Colleen, Andrei and Mark.

We chose a photo from the internet that had a film noir effect to it, we decided to go with a poster image from the horror film 'The Thing.'

When we looked at this image, we thought that the best way to replicate this image was to light someone from behind. Colleen offered to be our model. It took us longer than we thought to get the same effect. We tried using all the three different lights, as we thought they would give a much more darker shadow. After when we thought we finally got the image correct, Fergus came to check what we had done and said we didn't actually succeed in copying the image. He showed us how we could get the same lighting effect from the image by just using one light. Unfortunately we ran out of time, so we weren't able to film this image.

After doing this, we was given another task to create another film noir image. This time it was just me and Colleen.

Here is an example we was trying to re-create.

This time me and Colleen only wanted to have lighting so that we could focus on the eye area. Yet again this was a lot harder to achieve than we thought.

Here is our attempt of re-creating the look from the image of the woman above.

Overall from doing this workshop I have found an interest in film noir filming and definitely want to do a film noir type of film in the future. I feel that having this workshop helped show how important lighting can be and how positioning the lighting differently can help make a scene more dramatic.