Directions: Lighting workshop 2: Portrait lighting

Lighting Workshop 2

In this lighting workshop I learnt the importance of detail when it came to lighting. We watched a video where they went  into depth about how certain film scenes where lit and it honestly blew my mind with the amount of detail and effort it takes. When you watch films to don't even realise that some of the "basic" looking scenes and shots probably have around six different lights in the lighting set up. Its honestly amazing.

In our lesson we also looked at the ARRI handbook where it gave you example lighting set ups that you could try out with the kits. After going through an example with the whole class, we were then sent off to do one each. I selected the example from page 22. 

Here is the result; 

We had problems with burnout because we just couldn't seem to dim the key light down enough but after fiddling around with it some more, we were able to calm the light down a little bit by moving it away more and adding two diffusers. The specs are as follows; 

• Key Light on Saskia's left side, but a reflector on the right side bouncing onto the right side of her.
• Fill light was pointed at the background, just past the bin. It was our aim to get the bins in the shot, focused and somewhat lit up as well, I'm sure this type of lighting would be used to enhance the back ground instead of the usual bokeh depth of field.
• Back light pointed to the back of the actor (from her right side)

Lighting seems to be an art form. It is an art form and it is apparent to me that physics plays a big part in it. You have to visualise they way the light would shine and bounce off of objects so it really intertwines with it. Its interesting ad I hope that with lots more practice I will be good at this because I've noticed how much of a difference to a scene it makes when lighting is properly used. It adds a certain professionalism that I hope to achieve in my productions. I learnt a lot in these sessions and I hope we get to have more so I can improve. I will not be using lighting kits for my projects this time round but I will keep in mind all the information that I have learnt for next time.