Practical: Lighting Experiment

Practical: Lighting Experiment

I decided to film some close up shots of the girl's face to include in the fast edited sections of our film opening. As I didn't want the whole face in the shot to increase tension and keep the enigma around the girl character. I did a range of shots:

• The girls mouth
• The girl blowing out a candle
• The girls eye

Girls Mouth:

I used white face paint to paint the bottom half of my face, to represent the undead character. I started with white light facing opposite my face to create a blank lighting effect.

I noticed that the face was too bright and that the bare shoulder reduced the effect of the eerie mood that the shot was meant to create. So a placed a black blanket over my shoulders which made he face look a better shade of white and increased the eerie effect. 

After this I changed the lighting angle. I moved the bright white light downwards so that it was faced slightly upward, aiming under my chin. This made a large difference and the shot was complete. 

Girl with Candle:

I decided to include a candle in front of the girls face to increase the tension due to the candle blurring some of the face out. A common convention of the horror genre is to keep enigma around the main antagonist to create suspense and build anticipation.

The gap between the edge of the blanket and my jaw bone was too obvious in this shot. To improve both the colouring and the effect I didn't use a white light and relied on the light from the candle. This lighting worked better as created an eerie effect. 

I am unlikely to use this clip in the editing of the film opening as I do not believe it fits very well. I filmed the final shot to replace it.

Girl's eye:

I filmed this shot on a different day to the above. I used white face paint around my eye to keep the continuity in the clips and improve the effect of the girl's eye. I used a white contact to represent that the girl is possessed as it is unusual and when moved quickly becomes very eerie.

 

A close-up of the white contact lens

I used an extreme close up shot of my eye moving in different directions. As I filmed it myself the framing was off in parts of the three clips I filmed, but I believe that I will have enough footage to be able to edit parts into our film opening.

An example of the footage is below:



 

If there is not enough footage with the correct framing I can use the crop option on Final Cut Pro to ensure that there is no unpainted skin in the shot, decreasing the worth of the effect.