2. What does the angle of your light have to do with your character and story?
3. How can you incorporate this in your film noir?
Front lighting is light that comes in front of the subject, relative to the camera. It can give your subject a flat appearance, since it eliminates any shadows on their face. The angle of your light brings depth to your image. Having light slightly above your subject's face, aka "beauty lighting", highlights the bone structure of their face and the shadows define their jawlines, cheeks, and hide their chin. Having light directly above them shining down, emphasizes these shadows quite a bit, giving them an intimidating or brooding look since their eyes are casted in the shadow, and since it is hiding some of their features. Under lighting your subject can also give it the same intimidating feel, for a similar reason, this time casting the shadows up their face. Having light 45 degrees relative to your camera will create shadows on the opposite side of your subject's face, defining their features but still keeping them relatively lit. Moving the light completely to the side gives a dramatic, mysterious look to your subject as one half of their faces is completely in the shadow. A back light is used to separate your subject from the background by highlighting the back of their heads. We can use all of these tactics in our film noir depending on the context of our scene. I think the most useful one we'll use is the side light and beauty light, since our noir is very focused on our main character who is going through a moral dilemma.
No comments:
Post a Comment