Lighting Techniques

For the filming of my piece, I must consider how I will utilise the lighting to help change the look of my different scenes. To think about this, I've started to look at the term 'three point lighting'. I used a website called 'media college' to do this, which provided me with the pictures below and helped me to understand the term. The link can be found by clicking here.

Three point lighting:
This is a standard method that involves three different points of lighting: key light, fill light, and back light.













Above is the the key light and the main light. It usually has the most influence on the look of the scene, and is placed to one side of the camera to so that one side is well lit and the on the other side a shadow is created. For my filming, it is likely that I will use at minimum a key light to help create shadows in some places and to create actual light in others. I am planning to experiment with this soon.

This light is known as the fill light, and is placed opposite the key light to fill any shadows that it creates. This light is not always needed if the shadows that are created by the key light are wanted. This light is not usually very bright as its main purpose is to fill shadows. For my filming process, I doubt I will use a fill light, but if when I'm experimenting I find that a key light creates unnecessary shadows then I may consider using a fill light to stop this.

The final light from the three point lighting is the back light. As you can see from the picture, this light behind the other two and is not used to provide a direct light. Instead, its purpose is to provide definition and subtle highlights around a characters outlines. This can help separate the character from the background to create more of a three dimensional look. For my piece, I do no think this back light will be needed, however when I begin experimenting I may see if it creates more of an effect on my characters.

Reflective Comment:
This piece of research was very useful and needed with the filming process coming up. I think that these types of lighting will be used by myself when I'm setting up a scene ready for filming. I think I covered each area of the three point lighting well and considered if they would be useful for me. To improve this task I could have included some pictures of my scenes with the experimentation of these lighting techniques, but I do plan to do that some time in the future.