Post 12: Advanced Production Skills Workshop 2

Advanced Production Skills Workshop 2 - Quality

In our second workshop on lighting we were set the task to produce a short video clip showing light quality and how it affects the overall outcome of the film.

Their were two mains types of lighting we focused on which, Hard and Soft.

Hard lighting is lighting that is directly on the object being filmed creating 
very distinctive and bold shadows and edges.

Picture from - http://www.google.co.uk/images

Soft lighting is lighting that is Indirect or diffused and it has different and manipulated contours and textures which give the overall feeling of ‘softer’ light.

picture from - http://www.google.co.uk/images

The task was to get into groups of 5 which would form the basis for our production group. We then have to allocate each other different roles within the production group. These roles were:

Director- coordinates the group to achieve the experiment.

Camera- Set up and position of the camera, and record evidence

Clapper-Writes "boards" to notify the audience what they are watching. Also helps the recorder

Recorder- Notes down the experiments variables and monitors decisions and revisions made.

Gaffer-Positioning of light and equipment

Character in the scene.

After we had allocated roles for each person within our production group, we were then told that we were going to go of into different rooms and create the different affects of lighting.

After we had been briefed on what we had to achieve, we then set down in our groups and discussed what and how we were going to execute the task.

This is where we hit our first problem as we only briefly discussed what we were going to do and then we went ahead and filmed. This meant that we had not fully discussed the task in a group and this reflected in the clip as it was rushed and not well planned out.

The picture below shows the layout which we used.

Different methods the group would use

Different methods the group would use

As a group we decided that the best way to manipulate the light and create different shadows on the character which was going to be me, was to use different methods of diffusion to show different levels of lighting.

From this clip we deciphered that we had made a fair few crucial mistakes when filming which can be clearly seen in the clip.

1) The lighting in the room was to dark so, which meant that what ever kind of light we had on the character, it would be very harsh and sharp, even when defused.

2) The camera was on automatic focus which meant that when we put the boards which showed what diffusion was present, the camera did not have time to focus on them as they were not held in front of the camera for a long enough time which meant that they were blurry and by the time we moved them out of the way, the camera had focused on the short shot of the boards which made the long shot of the character out of focus. This meant that the whole production was shot out of focus.

3) The light was not in the optimum position for lighting up the character which meant that when we were filing, only half the face was lit up and the other half was out of shot.

If we were to do this task again, we would change each of the above by;

1) Having more artificial light on when filing, which would have been easy as the room had lighting facilities as normal as well as it being a drama room so it had additional lighting rigs which we could have taken advantage of.

2) Taken the camera off automatic focus and perhaps manually focused on the character and when the boards would be held up, they may be out of focus but because they would be so close, it would be readable. Also for the whole team to learn the functions of the camera.

3) Change the position of the light and use addition artificial lighting to create a wormer atmosphere as well as making all shots look clearer which will allow the diffusions be seen.