Part 2: Composition · Project 07: Depth

Project 7: Creating depth with light

For this exercise, I used the view of part of our kitchen to attempt to show depth by making use of light. Before continuing with the details of how I went about this project, I am going to jump to the end of it. I asked my actor to help by walking into and out of the kitchen as I was to trying to build depth into using light. As I’m sure you can imagine, this was a fairly laborious task. After numerous rounds of stalking through the kitchen, actor stagnation set in and we decided to give it a break and continue the exercise in the evening.

We it came time to continue, it was late and dark and the lighting definitely took on a more ominous feeling. The imagination also started to work. So, I did the exercise in a slightly different way.

We had a great deal of fun doing this, but there was also quite a serious part to it; working out the lighting so that there was depth but also working out how to use the lighting so that you could see what needed to be seen. I would like to make a comment about the sound; when I added the sound, I was working with a reasonably good headset and the base in this music was brilliant, like it was coming up from the floor. When I rendered the video out and played it on my laptop with the laptop speaker, the music didn’t sound as good. In fact it sound a bit tinny and the base was lost completely. I was not sure what to do; find other music or assume that it would be heard with reasonale speakers/headphones?

In the first shot, the depth is created almost exclusively by where the lighting has been placed. On the non-lighting front, I put the table in the foreground so that my actor walked behind it and this does give a depth cue. I also took the shot down a corridor and it is just possible to see the receding perspective line of the ceiling at the top right of the frame but this is quite weak. The main depth cues are coming from the lighting, of which there are three layers and four different light sources.

The first layer has a light hidden behind the box under the table. It creates a layer between the table and the foreground. The second light creating this layer is a small spotlight hidden behind the pillar on the left and directed so that it showed up the table and a bit of the wall as well. I’m not sure if this was necessary. To make sure that the light under the table didn’t burn out the shot or create too much light, I blocked the side that would face my actors legs with some books and put a plastic sheet over the top to diffuse the light.

My greatest difficulty with this lighting is that although it achieved the layer separation, the motivation for the light in that position was not clear. In Lighting for Cinematography, Landau (2014:40) says that there must be motivation for the light source/s, in other words it should be obvious for the viewer where and what is causing the light. Examples of light sources include windows, lamps, bedside lights, fireplace, someone lighting a match. The source of the light must also be logical, e.g. it wouldn’t make any sense to have someone lit from below when the apparent light source was a window high up on the wall. In the end, I decided that my scene was so strange anyway (who really prepares a clementine this way?) that strange lighting could be seen to add to the bizarreness of it all.

The second shot is where my actor is standing (mid-way between the table and the counter behind him). This was the trickiest lighting configuration to set up. It is a spotlight (actually a bedside table light) that is on a counter behind the pillar to the left. It had to be positioned to achieve three things:

  • To light up one side of the actors’ face so that it looked creepy
  • Reflect off the clementine the actor was going to pick up
  • Cause a glint on the chopper that the actor was going to walk out with

It took quite a bit of experimenting and rehearsing to get all three things lit in the way that I wanted.

The final light layer was at the back, purely to separate the foreground and the actor from the background.

In the second shot, the main aim was to backlight the actor (not sure if I’ve described this correctly, for the viewer the actor is backlit from the front of the actor!) to create the depth whilst he chopped up the clementine. This was achieved by having a fairly bright tube light running along the wall but diffused by pointing the light at the counter.

I also learnt that if I left the foreground lighting on (light under the table), it was distracting and almost acted as a visual pause or a barrier to looking through to the actor. I switched the foreground lighting off to help the viewer look straight through to the action happening in the third or background layer. However, it left the foreground too much lost in the dark. I added a torch light that I shone on the wall to the left of the frame. It cast a blue tinged light which was completely different to all the other lighting. I honestly cannot say what it’s purpose was, it also lacked motivation but it made the scene look more creepy, so I left it in.

It was important to separate the actor from the mid-ground, so I positioned a small spotlight off to the right, behind the pillar and made sure that it only slightly lit the back and one side of the actors’ head and a bit of his T-shirt.

The third shot was an attempt to create a more open sense of the space (so please don’t expect continuity in this – it’s project in lighting and depth), so I removed the table from in front of the action. The clear view to the chair and the actor gave a greater sense of space even though I had zoomed in slightly for this shot.

I moved the backlighting so that it was behind the actor when he sat down. This created the separation between the actor and the background which was necessary as the first attempts at filming had shown the actor blending in with the background. To light the actor more, I had a spotlight high up on the right, shining down on his back and part of his face. The inadvertent bonus was that the cupboards  behind him also got lit and created more of a sense of separation. The final problem to solve was how to light up the plate that the clementine’s were on. I positioned the torch so that it just reflected off the edge of the plate and stopped it from fading into the background. I would have preferred a brighter light but this was all I had.

As a final lighting experiment, my actor used his mobile phone to light up his face from below. To achieve this the brightness of the phone’s display needed to be turned to maximum.

 

Returning the project, we were required to create three distinctly different impressions of depth in the same space by manipulating the lighting and objects in the shot.

This is the video I created fro the project with seven different shots:

Shot 1: I aimed for both depth and space in this shot.  I used a low angle to get the ceiling and passageway into the shot so that there were receding lines. The lighting is all natural; coming from behind the camera, from a window in the kitchen and left of the frame and more larger windows to the right. Although there is a sense of space and depth, the depth does not come from the lighting; it comes from the receding lines and the objects that are placed right foreground and left mid-ground.

As the actor walks through the kitchen some of the window lighting reflects off his trousers but this isn’t doesn’t create anything other than a sense that this is normal given that there is a window.

Shot 2:  For this shot, my objective was to have one layer of depth and see if that changed the sense of the space. The layer of light is built from the natural lighting just off to the right of frame (this was the one source that I could not cover during the day) and a bedside light that is just behind the right pillar giving off a large amount of diffuse light. I closed all other sources that I could.

By reducing the amount of light, the sense of the space is that it is smaller, even though I had pushed into this scene. There is separation between the table in the foreground and the mid- and background. I had the feeling that this was quite a calm setting, nothing dramatic was going to happen except maybe a dropped fork. Very ordinary, day-to-day and recognizable. It also had the sense that it was early morning, most likely being create by the low lighting casting shadows on the wall.

Shot 3: I wanted to change the sense of the space in this shot; to make it more closed. To do this I created two layers of light in the mid-ground. The background is not lit at all. The lights come from the light I places under the table (as explained for the previous video) and one below eye line spotlight aimed at lighting the actor when he got to the table.

The effect was to shut off the background and focus everything in the front. It makes the scene quiet flat, so although it creates a creepy feeling it doesn’t give any depth.

Shot 4: For this shot I wanted the depth, so I added background lighting to the previous shots settings. The background lighting was a narrow spotlight (I taped paper around it to narrow the light beam) that was aimed at the coffee machine only because I didn’t want the background to be the focus but I did want the depth. The light also managed to softly light up the right corner of the kitchen.

I also added a few items in front of the table to give a more cluttered sense of the space – the view is blocked and the audience has to visually climb over the clutter and table junk.

Overall there is some depth in the shot, but still didn’t feel that interesting. It was at this point that I started thinking that it would be better to film at night when I would not have the natural light coming in from the right and brightening the scene up too much.

Shot 5: For this shot, the lighting was set up in the same way as for shot 4, however in this case I concentrated the movement in the background. The back of the actor lights up well to achieve separation between her and the background, however her body ends up blocking the light that was originally shining onto the wall and so the sense of depth is intermittently lost in the far right corner.

The black and white shirt of the actor works well to bring up the white highlights and separate out from the background.

Shot 6: For this shot I wanted the action to be deep down in the scene, so I removed the mid-ground lighting and put a spotlight directly in front of the actor. To show the contrast he turns the light off after a few seconds. This worked reasonably well to create depth but completely lacked motivation for the light source – there was no credible reason for a light like that to be directly in front of the actor.

Shot 7: For this shot I wanted to see the effect of moving from the foreground to the background. The actor stands into the foreground; backlit and then moves to the mid-ground and is side lit.  This works to create depth as the lighting on the actor changes as he moves deeper into the scene.

Having the actor in shadow and in the foreground gave an interesting sense of threat. This was mainly driven by not being able to see must of the detail of the actor – like having someone come and stand very close to you in a dark space and you don’t know who they are or what they are doing – very uncomfortable.

Shot 8: For the final shot, I wanted to see what the effect would be of changing the exposure, so as the actor gets to the kitchen I brightened the scene up. The effect was very incredibe; as the light came up, the sense of the size of the space also increased and the mood went from being dark and slightly oppressive to far more upbeat.

You can also see in this shot that the idea of the clementine is by now fully mature and it is destined to become the unfortunate supporting actor in the video that was made later in the evening.

Bibliography

Landau, David. (2014) Lighting for Cinematography. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

2 thoughts on “Project 7: Creating depth with light

  1. I am impressed with how you attacked this exercise. I particularly like the idea of the dissection of the clementine and it made me think of a further back story of why there could be an over- emphasis of why the character is performing this task in such a fashion – perhaps he believes his hated ex-wife has been turned into the fruit and its moment of revenge, hehehe.
    The lighting processes you exercised were effective and I’m intrigued as to see how each lighting step could alter the narrative of the action., should you have filmed the scene differently.
    Peter

    1. Or her name was Clementine! You have an interesting imagination :-). I enjoyed working with the light. I think it’s easier to create creepy scenes with dark and light than it is to create more positive and bright scenes – which is weird because I don’t consider myself to be especially ‘dark’ natured. For Assignment 2 I am thinking about doing a completely paranoid sequence with moving light and long shadows and the odd shady characters to up the paranoia.

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