Lighting Techniques

Lighting Techniques 

At the beginning of our short movie, we used natural lighting to show the beauty of the outdoor area and show what the main characters could be compared to how they are trapped indoors. We were filming quite early in the day so the lighting was bright and clear and the audience can get a clear view of what is going on in the shot.

As our short film is a Horror/Thriller, we wanted to create a creepy/unsettling atmosphere. Typically in horror movies, the darkness is represented as threatening and mysterious; to create this kind of feeling, we also used low-key lighting in our short film to connotate this kind of atmosphere. This was to make the ambience of the short film suspenseful and fearful for what was going to happen to the main characters. To create this, we turned all of the lights off in our rooms and then pulled the curtains to make the rooms feel darker.

Ambient lighting was used in general for a source of light in the room. Despite all of the lights being off in the short film, the audience could still make out the characters in the scene. The warm and bright lighting emitting from the computer screens is the only source of light showing the characters, but however you can only see a small portion of the characters making the audience feel fearful of what/who could be lurking in the dark behind and denoting suspense.

In this scene, we used key lighting; we captured our main subject in the middle of the camera so that she was the main focus in the scene. We used this as our main light so all the attention would be drawn onto our main character instead of the background. We moved the light further from the subject so it will create harsh shadows as seen in the background and attempted to bounce the light off of the wall so it creates a main focus on the main character.

In this scene, we used backlighting. The backlight hit the main character from behind and was placed higher than the main character. It was used to separate the main character from the background. It helped give the scene more shape/depth, drawing attention to the main character.