Post 12: Media Language Lighting 2 (Quality & Direction Experiment)

The quality and direction of light strongly affects the look and feel of a film. In order to understand and learn about the use of lights in our own film, not only did we research into the two aspects but we also set up our own lighting experiments.

Quality

Within lighting, quality refers to the intensity of the illuminations that the audience are viewing. This can be separated into two areas that are hard and soft.

Hard is a direct light creating bold shadows, with crisp textures and edges.

Soft is indirect or diffused which blurs contours and textures, and has a softer contrast between light and shade.

Direction

This is simply where the direction of the light is coming from and the effects it is creating. Every light will have a point where it is at its brightest and where is will wander and lose itself. A few directions that the light can come from are front, back, top, bottom and side.

Below are a few examples of the direction of light:



Madonna Vogue Video

The Madonna video Vogue is a great example in showing the quality and direction of lighting. Throughout the video there is a variety of different lighting techniques such as three point lighting and lights shining in different directions. The lighting is stylistic and replicates the strong contrasting light and dark shadows seen within film noir.

The above pictures each show a different kind of lighting, the one of Madonna's face showing a key light. This photo shows the whole of Madonna's face illuminated, with a black background, highlighting that she is the main focus and the most important part of the scene. The picture with the man sat down shows the light coming from a bottom left direction which causes an attached shadow on his face from the positioning of his hand. Finally the next picture, the woman dancing in the middle of the frame could be described as a main back light due to the background being beaming white and the figure being partially darker than a normal person.