#6 Lighting and Mood (how they connect!)

 Lighting and Mood

Lighting in a film is another important aspect in a film’s final product. Not only does it illuminate the scene, it creates the mood in a particular scene, moves the audience’s eye/focus, and can emphasize the feeling the character(s) are experiencing in that scene as well.  

 Lighting is what brings your scene to life, it brings the dark to light and hides secrets from the audience in the dark. An example of this in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Pt.1). In the opening scene, there is a low lighting on the minister of magic when he is performing his monologue. This is to reflect there is more to what is being said, there is a secret waiting to be revealed. 

A particular scene in the media…

Although not a film, Outer Banks is a piece that focuses plenty on natural looking lighting, to convey the sense of realness (reality) that the show is trying to portray. It is set on the beautiful beaches of the outskirts of South Carolina and emphasizes the split between rich (the Kooks) and poor (the Pogues).

One part of the show that stands out is how the lighting changes from so saturated to shadowy. One scene in particular was the main group of Pogues searching for the “cross of gold” in the church. The lighting is warm and portrays the one of the Sun in the afternoon, and it creates the sense of heat and urgency to find the cross. When they return to the church after someone got injured, the shadowy lighting to create the feeling of night, also gives off the feeling of betrayal and secrecy, which later in the scene, the Pogues found out that some Kooks stole the cross without their knowledge. This makes the audience feel the excitement of the discovery to the disappointment of knowing that all that hard work has soon been taken away, showing how just from lighting, it makes the scene come alive and understandable. 

For my video…

The concept of my video surrounds the idea of long-distance. The mixture of heartbreak and hope. Similarly to the Outer Banks example, I would like to use (in correspondence to my composition of scenes), warm and shadowy lighting to show the difference of the couple’s feelings/thoughts at specific moments. 

For the beginning of the film's opening, I will use colorful and bright lighting to represent the abundance of love, and natural, dull lighting (almost monotone) to reflect the distance between the two and the weight of the feeling of separation. To further drive understanding of what I am trying to portray in the 2 minutes we have available.