Lights! Camera! More Lights!

  Good afternoon my readers! In today’s topic I want to talk to you about the type of lighting we want to utilize during the filming of our opening sequence. As a disclaimer I want to state that these lighting choices may or may not change as time goes on through production, as it may be more convenient to use one lighting over the other in terms of what is available to us. Anyways,  how about we hop into the discussion.

        Lighting in a film requires specific amounts of intensities to establish tones a director wants to put to use for their scenes. For example, an actor on stage requires a 3 point lighting to effectively illuminate the actor’s body on stage, allowing all eyes to focus in on them. That lighting can vary in how bright or dark it may be, depending on the mood and context. Additionally, how cold or warm the light can be, where cold is whiter and warm provides us a more orange color. During the restroom scene in our film, Offsides, I want to utilize this warm tonnage to capture our protagonist, Ricky, in an environment where the shadows are emphasized much more heavily than a white light can do. The orange would blend well with these shadows to expose Ricky’s crumbling mental state, right before loss at a football game. The warm lighting allows all this, as well as making the scene feel more intense and claustrophobic on screen.

Moreover, we encounter the number 1 difficulty in producing our film, the outside lighting. We are preferably filming in the evening where the sun begins to set, which may also be a metaphor to Ricky's complete downfall during this opening sequence. However, capturing the right amount of light to reflect off the cast’s face is an issue, as well as when exactly during a shot we want it. An example is when we have a close-up of Ricky’s face before he runs a play for his team, where we have the sunlight reflecting off his skin to convey sudden hope within him that he can beat the opposing team. It contrasts with the scene in the restroom, where his face does not reflect as much of the light as during this scene. We then want to take away this hope with him being tackled by the opposing team, then revealing him on the ground, this time with no sunlight being exposed anywhere on his body. He is completely overtaken by the shade. 

All in all, lighting tells a tale just as well as the actual story does, so we must utilize it as best we can. However, due to our time constraints and location of filming, we may have some failure and neglect in that department. I am glad I can at least explain the vision I have in my head, rather than it going to waste.