Reading and Writing:

Until now, I haven’t thought much about lighting and how it portrays mood in the films we watch. But this week I have been introduced to this important concept through the Bare Bones Camera Course for Film and Video. Lighting is just as important as composition when filming, but it often comes with challenges.

Shooting outside for example, you’ll quickly find that the overhead sun and backlight casts harsh shadows onto faces. To the point where you will need reflectors or fill lights to counter act this. Unless you’re going for a mysterious or moody look, it’s best to come prepared and know that additional lighting will usually be needed. Of course, with fill lights, you will need electricity to power them, where as a reflector is a silver board that can bounce the sunlight into the shadowed areas. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. But when trying to counter act the noon time sun, a fill light can brighten up shadows well.

For interior lighting, there are three types: focusing quartz, broads, and softlights. Focusing quartz is the movie version of a spotlight. It can go from a small, concentrated area of light to a softer, spread-out flood light. Spreading out the light in most cases produces a more flattering light. You can then bounce the light off walls and ceiling to adjust for your shot. Broads are lights that are non-focusing, with no control. It will give you a flat, even pattern of light. Finally, the softlights are bounce lights, meaning the lamp is facing the silver scoop so that the light bounces off the silver and out towards the subject. The soft light doesn’t need to be bounced off a wall and so it’s more convenient. 

It’s also key to know exactly where to put all of these lights. But luckily, we can follow the basic lighting setup. To do this you will start with the key light. This is your main light, its placed 45 degrees above your subject. Since your viewers will be attracted to the brightest area, getting this light in the right place is important. From there you place in your fill light. This goes on the opposite side of the subject and key light. It should give off a soft hue, so that there aren’t any hard shadows, yet give just enough depth. Then add in the backlight. This light should fall on the head/shoulders and be behind your subject. This helps them separate from the background. Lastly, the background light can be placed in. This one lights up the background so that its lit just like the foreground in your shot, also adding depth. Using this method, the interviews you conduct, and other similar scene will all have proper lighting that can help make your story more memorable. Of course, as more people get added to the scene, more lights may need to be added too, but this basic setup should be used as a starting point every time.

With lighting in place, you’re probably thinking, “Finally, it’s time to shoot!”. But before we do that, some pre-planning is required. Hopefully you have already thought about what story you want to tell, what you want your audience to know, and how you want them to feel.

For some short video content, it may make sense to shoot the entire thing all the way through from a wide angle. Then go back and shoot the entire video again in a medium shot and then as a close up shot. But as we get better at this process it may start to make more sense to shoot out of order. For example, if scenes 1 and 3 are at the top of a hill, then it makes sense to shoot these two one after the other. Then you can shoot scenes 2 & 4 together, at the bottom of the hill. This will save time and effort by only moving the camera twice, as opposed to three times.

If you have created a storyboard, it will be easy to see what shots can be done together and which ones can be done individually. This will also help you visualize the shots you need to get, all before arriving at the location. Then once your there, you can use slates to mark the scenes, so that when you edit you will immediately know if the take is good or bad and where it belongs in the sequence. All of these steps help make the shooting process that much more enjoyable.

Research to Inform:

Good video storytelling is everything and one documentary that has stayed with me is Man on Wire. What I love about this documentary is the way its structured. Throughout the entire film you get to see actual footage of the event that took place in 1974, combined with interviews from multiple sources, and great re-enactments which help progress the story. Not only is it about a daring man who wants to attempt a high wire walk, but most of the film is about the actions leading up to this day. So, while the stunt itself is short, the film was able to tell a more interesting story by explaining Philippe Petit’s background and how he got here. The interviews are done well, they ask the difficult questions, and give us multiple perspectives. The entire film feels well produced since they have many different types of angles of the tightrope scene and were able to go back and forth between the past and present day. The film makers were also able to show the tightrope scene by using 3D models. This made the watching experience more enjoyable by understanding just how wild and dangerous this stunt is. Without showing the details of an event like this, most viewers would have lost interest, especially if it was just grainy footage from the 70s.

Even some news channels can produce some great stories. Above is one of them from Channel 12, which focuses on the bagel’s impact on New York culture. While this is a fun, lighthearted topic, the cinematography really caught my eye. The close-up shots of the bagels and its toppings are immersive and instantly gets me caught up in the history and story. We get to take a journey on how bagels came to be and get to hear from other New Yorker’s about their bagel shop. To me, what makes this story well produced is the angles of the food shots and getting extreme close ups of these bagels being made. We don’t just get wide shots of bakers baking, we see their hands molding the dough, we see the bagels going into an oven, and then finally slicing and topping the bagels. It’s very evident, that the producers thought about which scenes needed what angles, and how to best capture the constant movement of the people in the kitchen. What otherwise would be chaotic movements, we see deliberate motions captured, and great zoom ins that help us focus on just the bagel, not the background. What also elevated this news story was the flash back in time, showing old historical photos of original New York bakeries and the people who use to bake there. This helped take the video from a typical news story to a more interesting historical segment.

One film that caught my eye for all the wrong reasons was Bohemian Rhapsody. The movie is good, but the one bad scene has to be when Queen meets John Reid, his future manager. This one scene has 61 cuts in under 2 minutes, making it difficult to follow without getting dizzy. I remember first seeing this scene and not understanding why it was so difficult for me to follow along but now I understand that cutting so often can make a calm scene feel chaotic. Along with fast cuts, there was a point in the clip, around 58 seconds, where another band member speaks but we don’t see who said it, instead we see a wide shot of the restaurant they are sitting in. The scene ends shortly after that, so we never see who actually said that line, which always bothered me. The editing could be better by not cutting as often and showing at least some of the character speaking (as an L or J cut). Then they could have ended the scene with the wide shot. This way the audio and video would match, making it easier to follow who said what and not be as dizzy at the end of the scene.

Create:

As I start my next project, I decided to cover a topic that is near to my heart, and that’s libraries. As someone who grew up visiting the library often and loves to read, I thought doing a mini documentary on how library services are changing would be interesting. It’s only been recently that libraries have noticed their patrons wanting more than just books. They want to pick up a new hobby or attend a town event to socialize. Libraries are becoming much more than a quiet place to read, and I want to cover this transition.  

After getting approval to film and interview, I focused on narrowing down the purpose of the documentary. I decided that I would explain the broad shift most libraries are seeing around the country and then zoom in on one library in Washington, Connecticut. Specifically looking at Gunn Memorial Library, I would be able to explain the new services they offer and get to interview a librarian who has seen this modernization firsthand. With that I was able to write my narration and visualize what video would go along with the audio. While I have never been to this library, I tried my best to use google to see what it actually looked like. This gave me some ideas of what to shoot. From there I came up with some questions to ask the librarian and was able to think about music and the overall mood.

While I haven’t shot anything yet, I’m excited to visit. I’ll be conducting and lighting my first interview on camera and seeing how this library is paving the way for a brighter, more social, community space. Below is my pre-planning document for this project.