Lighting for Various Scenarios

Given the many different types of location around the world and the lightings that come with it it's always best to think about what to use and where it'll be a good fit compared with others. Using three examples hopefully I'll be able to show you why lighting is important and what effect it can have when used. (All links and screenshots for research can be found below)

Talking Heads:

Now when people say talking head, I'm sure you think to shows where it's either debate or host + guest. While these are true a more common form is that for interviews, this is literally just like the image above not a full profile but maybe half or just the face. This means that when lighting for this the primary area you'll want lit is the face of the interviewee.

Now there are a couple of choices that I will get into later but first I want to talk about placement, not matter what light source you end up picking chances are that you'll need to think about where you put the light as this will effect camera exposure and the actual person themselves. Too much and the video will be overexposed, too little and then the video won't be able to capture much as it'll be too dark. So a highly recommend and almost standard position is just behind the camera angled towards the interviewee, as this gets the light on them but also doesn't make the camera overexpose the image.

In terms of the lighting itself you have a number of good choices, some used more frequently than others such as a ring-light mainly used by people on Instagram and YouTube but can be used for interviews too. It works well with some of the more common and more likely used lights like LED light panels in order to complement each other.Typically a LED light panel that I mentioned before will be used in a three round set-up just because they're slightly cheaper and give a full clearance whereas a ring light will still have a shadow area.

A final thing to consider when lighting for this type of interview is background, having a backdrop will massively affect the amount of light across the entire interview time but the key deciding factor is colouring. Having a black backdrop will absorb the light making it a darker scene and therefore a more serious and sombre tone for the interview. Whereas a white backdrop will reflect it back and light up the backend of the space as well making for more of a brighter tone and maybe a lighter topic.

Hopefully this will help you next time you film an interview.

A Night Time Shoot:

Now night, dark and not much exposure or reliance for the sun which gives you more flexibility when it comes to set up but like I said it's dark which makes it more difficult to show highlight maybe more key areas if modelling or can be used for a different effect and tone all together depending on where that light comes out at and the intensity.

For complete coverage I'll do both photography and filming just to make sure that I don't miss anything important.

Photography, on the face of it usually a bright subject, with studios and lights everywhere on white backdrops. But this doesn't mean that there's no reason not to use night for it, depending on where you go will determine what you need and where to put it, for example in a city shot you may not need that much extra lighting but using a tripod and lens hood will be musts to get the most out of the time there. Both of these will help with stability and for added measure the hood will also protect from lens flare form bright off shot sources.

However say you're promoting a product but you want a darker area so you use an alleyway in order to get the right shadows, then you run into another problem which is the light. As mentioned earlier having a tripod and lens hood will be a saviour no matter where you are but lighting the area will need to be considered, having a small portable light source will be handy even if it's a flashlight or a phone attachment as they are easy to get hold of and will give the right light needed.

For filming the same concept still applies, tripods and hoods will be a must in order to get the best product out of your time, but there's a new technique that will boost it to a new level.

So we're back in this alley way and you have your filming equipment set up: camera, tripod, lens hood, light source and subject but you feel it's bland. This new set up should help with colourings. Depending on what your going for will determine what colours, modern party then maybe strobe with brighter colour sheets or if it's more of a sombre moment then deeper colours like dark blues might be better off being used.

The reason for considering using colours when filming is that it adds that little bit extra to the scene and the reactions from the audience, it also helps in creating atmosphere and meaning lifting it up and bringing it forward.

Hopefully now you can see the importance of lighting in a night shoot for both photography and film and how adding or taking away can give it something extra.

Portable Documentary:

Now as the name suggests this is a filming setup where movability is key, now cameras are the easy part having them either handheld or on a body-rig but either way working with the camera is the easy bit now trying to get the best lighting that you can out of the scene while still trying to be portable is the more difficult part to this whole thing. Big lighting rigs like the one we discussed for the talking heads portion won't be as practical as others just because of transportation and time consumption in setting them back up to only collapse them again after a small segment.

Now for recommendations in terms of how to get the most use out of it, obviously the most well known and used lighting but the natural lighting from all around. This is one of the most common sources just because it's easily accessible for everyone and that 9 times out of 10 it will always cover enough area for your shoot without needing much more extra light, but in the cases of lets say a shadow overcasting the scene when you need light then you'll need some sot of set up, so you'll probably want some small ones.

One that you could use is a video light, these can be attached to a twist type of tripod and those can come in small sizes making them very portable and have enough brightness to cover whatever scene or setting you have. But because they're small this reduces their effective range and therefore limits what you can do with just one and will probably increase the amount spent on the production.

Now depending on the type of documentary glowsticks could be a good alternative, they still give the light needed but can also give a good and cheap alternative for colourings to give the scene a different tone or to emphasise a certain point made within the film. But again due to the small nature of them they'll still only cover a small effective area but then there's a bigger issue, glowsticks don't have the same time potential as the film light. The film light is battery powered meaning that only can it be recharged but it also can last a while in terms of life whereas once you snap and shake them glowsticks they only last a few hours if that so it's not cost effective either as you'd have to buy loads to counter balance the quickness that they run out.

From this your best bet will still be the film light just because you'll get more out of what money you put in, plus it adds colour sheets for cheap extras.

Hopefully this has given you a good insight into what lighting is good for what type of production.

Have a good day.

The Development Of Editing In The Industry

History and Development Of Editing

Now obviously there has been a significant increase in the power that editing software has, but where did it start and how did it get as strong as it is now? Well hopefully by the end of this you'll have gained a better understanding of editing in the industry and how it has grown to the powerhouse of today. (All evidence and links where I have found my information is at the end of this article)

We start with the earliest process back when film was actually on rolls and sectioned like a disposable camera, but before all of this modern technology films as I mentioned used to be physically cutting reels and sticking them back together with tape and then later would be glued, obviously a process like this is a very precise piece of work to avoid having to dip further into the budget in order to get it reprocessed in order to get the tape back. This would then provide the jumps helpful to boost along the story and act as almost an early version of a jumpcut.

This method obviously wasn't exactly a great thing for efficiency or timings but it was part of the ground breaking moment for the industry and the first instances for film making and moving pictures for wider audiences so of course it would then end up becoming almost the only way of making films.

Don't be alarmed or worried by this weird machine in front of you, it's actually the next step in movie editing. To give a brief kind of overview of it, it allows the editor to watch the project and then decide what edits need to go where etc. It rose to it's position during the 1930's when propaganda films were running at an all time high as it was during the build-up of and the start of World War 2.

However what makes the Moviola (the thing above) particularly unique is that it wasn't exactly as widely used as you might think on the surface. During this period of the editing there wasn't that many countries who used them, the most notable people would be the USSR, Germany and the US from which we can assume their allies too. All apart from Britain who instead used something different that was soon adopted by everyone.

While this next bit of machinery may look like the first version of a pre-historic DJ it's actually the next step in editing around the world but it actually starts in Europe. See during the 1930's when most of pretty much everywhere else was enamoured with what the Moviola could do, Europe moved on and started using the Flatbed (seen above) as their primary editing powerhouse.

What made this so great was it's almost full modern capabilities, such as being able to chop and link sequences back together and viewing the film and getting audio synced with it too as it allowed for magnetic audio (made by Germany in 1928 for recording sound that wasn't discovered by the Allies until they beat the Germans) to be played alongside making it one of the most significant developments in the media industry.

Now we get close to things of today starting with linear and nonlinear editing techniques, but what do I mean? Well on the face of it, the process is almost the same but what you use is different. It's the 1990's and everything is moving along quite rapidly including how we edit film but there are different ways and methods for doing so. In this case linear still uses tapes and cutting, keeping it in that straight line order and it's all linked from one thing to the next and if you want to change something then you have to be careful in how in case it gets damaged.

In contrast to this we have the similar albeit more modern choice of nonlinear editing which is all done digital, such as full digital recordings, editing on a computer etc., this is a more familiar version as now we have things such as Adobe which can sequence video captured.

It's time for a bit of logistics, by now almost all editing has moved to digital but linear and nonlinear still hold as an idea for editing sequences. The main thing that's changed is the steps, now called Online and Offline which doesn't have anything to do with the internet but rather the steps taken to get the process done, beginning with Offline. Offline is the initial step, making a rough draft of what the final product should and could look like for main editors and directors, this is never clean or in any sort of high definition because it's used for proof of concept or to help give ideas. It's also used to make an Editing Decision List (EDL) for the main editors who them work on increasing the definition, colour grading, implementing the list etc.

Online editing is where the main group sits, using high definition material to make the product using the EDL given by the offline editors, as mentioned before they do colourings (mainly corrections) but also add things like visual effects (possibly CGI) and other things too. It's easy to see why I called them the main group as they are responsible for the full making of the end product with assistance from the offline editors who help to provide the information and the baseline.

Here we are, modern era editing, from the starting points of things like the CMX keyboards which boosted nonlinear editing to an entirely different level to where it was at the beginning to Avid 1 which was designed in similar fashion to the Apple Macintosh II and boosted nonlinear editing even further and helped the design and software of what they were get boosted to today's places.

Now we don't have separate pieces of hardware for editing, it's all available to download from the internet but they all had those as a baseline and you can still see it, in Adobe and Final Cut Pro being able to take nonlinear scenes and moments and make them into a continuous flowing film. Being able to take audio and sync it with the images being played, then being able to watch the finished product which is reminiscent of where it all started.

Well that about covers it, hopefully now you know more about how much the industry has grown than when you started.

Have a great day!

Research credits:

https://www.sutori.com/story/the-history-of-editing-in-film--QJpt1BGzfkapALSCe9af3Upx

http://jholmeshnc.blogspot.com/2015/06/developments-in-editing-technology.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe7lssLns9Q&t=80s

Easy Rider Breakdown

Contextual Analysis:

I was watching easy rider the other day and while I was enjoying it I realised that maybe a lot of the meanings behind what was going would be missed by a standard movie goer, so I thought I breakdown one scene to help you figure out some of the deeper meaning behind what's going on.So let's get to it, the scene that I'll be analysing is the Cemetery Acid Trip scene

Right away we see and hear a lot so let's go through this first piece, in this introduction we see the four main characters in what would be considered unusual clothing. This helps us get a time period for this film, based on other factors around them like a lot of grass (which could be symbolic of later on in the piece) and the sounds of almost industrial mining equipment we can tell that the period is very early possible seventies or eighties going from rough eyeballing of the characters looks.

This is also re almost confirmed with their actions during this short dialogue free stretch, the way that they're just openly drinking in public and showing near constant affection most of the time in a more modern film there wouldn't be this level of affection between any character (except when following the trope of the genre; for example action would be after the catastrophe has been resolved) which helps us to confirm this date theory.

The type of camera shot in this scene is interesting too, it's almost between a medium and a wide shot giving us enough detail for the characters and the environment around them, making it the perfect type of shot for setting the scene with some foreshadowing whilst still being enigmatic about where they are and why they're there (which we then later learn is to take drugs) causing the start of this scene to be curious but also relaxed as there no fast-paced edits making action or quick changes to the angle and type of shot making it appear to the audience as a break almost from the main bulk.

This changes when they then take the drugs and it has some rapid changes and moves which highlights the chaos of the scene and probably the experiences that the characters have in that moment. Linking that to the hue over the entire scene (light sepia over it to add to the old feeling and an altered state that the characters enter) and the non-diegetic mix (between dialogue and the repeated sound of something banging in the background throughout the whole scene), which is a stark contrast to the relative calm of the previous scene where there was just ambience and quiet dialogue, we can tell that what happened to these characters wasn't exactly normal or what we would consider sane behaviour.

As previously mentioned there's a lot of sounds that happen all within that clip but the only bits that are non-diegetic are the ones that have been added in post (like the narration over other images linking to the person reading, or the banging continuing over everything) but it seems to rely heavily on diegetic making it more of a in the moment type of scene which further adds to the period set and made.

It looks as though it's both made and set in the late sixties/early seventies which would make sense given the grain over the film, the almost reliant use of diegetic sound that's carried throughout the entire clip to help it establish that they had to almost fully rely on what was captured in the moment rather than being able to add or change things in post as well as they are now. It helps to create atmosphere and immersion within the surroundings as it comes from the actual scene itself, almost like an audio mis-en-scene as well as a visual one too.

Lighting was another overarching theme throughout too, having a slightly sepia filter over the scene where they're sat before doing drugs helps to reinforce this sort of calm given from the scene, it has a warm kind of glow to it helping for this appealing yet calm feel at the beginning when they're establishing the acid drop where the filter has gone and it all seems to drop a shade or two in colour grading; maybe hinting at an almost dark decent once it started.

Hopefully this has given you a better idea of some of the things to keep an eye out for when watching a film and what they mean when you spot them!

Have a great day!