Lighting the Scene

     So now that I've talked about the set, lets take a minute or a two to talk about the lighting. I am personally under the impression that lighting, is very much an underrated aspect of filmmaking. It seems redundant, but without lighting you can't see anything. Because of that I love designing the lighting scheme for a scene. Sure, its tedious having to move a light slightly to the left or right in order to find a perfect position, but it pays off the in the end.

    For the lighting of the scene, I again referenced real photos of the workspaces animator use. I wanted to create a warm atmosphere. Warm hues tend to be a bit more welcoming, and generally if you're working in a space for a long period of time, you'd probably want to have a warm light as oppose toa dreary cold light. And especially if an animator has to use a computer for long periods of time, its better for their eyes to have warm light rather than cool light that could irritate their eyes. 

    I made it a priority to include practical lights in the scene that would help to motivate the lighting on the subject. I tried to work in props that emitted light and would make sense in the context of the scene. The first things I considered were two lamps, one a table top lamp and other a regular one. I placed then on far ends of the frame to light up the left and right of the scene. To achieve the warm look and feel, I swapped out their regular cool LED blubs, for two tungsten blubs that were in a box in my garage. Not only were the not as bright, but they also fit the mood I was going for. These lights along with a salt lamp, gave the background a warm look to it. They also served as backlights that would help with distinguishing the subject from the background. I also included some practical cool lights in the form of my computer monitor and the tracing surface. This mostly serves the purpose of just adding some variety to the scene.

    While back lights are cool for making silhouettes, that's not exactly what I'm going for. So I also included a key and a fill. For these lights I used two GVM 800D-RGB's light kits. I placed the key light downstage right (it might be late to mention, but last year I did take a theater tech class that taught me skills that I would end up using in this project). The key light was set to about 5300K to achieve the warm look. This light would light a major of the subject's face as well as give the background a general coat of light. While this set up would light the scene pretty well, it still felt flat, so I turned on the fill light. 

    For the fill, I wanted a different color light to contrast the key. I wanted to create an illusion of shadow. This was a technique I learn about last year when I saw a video about lighting design in theater. The concept is that rather than lighting a face and having the other half fall into darkness, lighting designers would use contrasting hues to create a fake shadow on someone's face. This serves to gives form to a subject, while also properly lighting all sides of that subject. Since I've been building up the warm atmosphere, I decided to use a purple fill light. Purple of course is on the opposite side of the color wheel than yellow, meaning that they'd heavily contrast one another. The purple hue could also been seen as moonlight and can be implied that the animator is working late at night.

    Overall I really liked how the lighting and set design came together. When I was setting up for film and planning it all out, I took both aspects in account and made sure they would complement each other. Before I leave, I'll leave you with a still of how the set and lighting ending up in the final shot.