DIRECTIONS: Expressive Lighting Workshop

For our next lighting workshop, we learned about the principles of expressive lighting and how it is used in different genres of films. As discussed previously, lighting is much more than just the brightness of a film set, but rather it sets the foundation for shooting more successful and professional film. In the realm of cinema, lighting is primarily used to set the mood and reflects the genre of a film, allowing the viewers to empathise and understand how to feel emotionally towards certain characters. For instance, filmmakers might use a spotlight on someone's face with a dark or unlit background to create a sombre mood, or express the tragedy of a character. 

The way in which lighting is arranged on a film set can dictate the mood. Expressive lighting was often used during the post-war era of cinema, otherwise the film noir period that extended from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. The stylised cinematography in film noir mostly expressed a mood of ambivalence, eroticism, fatalism, mysteriousness and menace. This was achieved by the choice of lighting which was conventionally low-key, hard, chiaroscuro, and had a black and white visual style, which was heavily influenced by German expressionist cinematography with notable classics such as Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922). We were also shown a video clip of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), which employed similar lighting techniques where subjects' faces were illuminated with harder lighting which achieves less softer shadows. Ultimately, it is our decision to illuminate a subjcet's the way we want to if we want to, but chiaroscuro lighting is always an option if filmmakers want to do more emotional storytelling with character's faces - a trope of film noir. So, this workshop was an opportunity for us to be experimental and explore different ways we could illuminate a subject's face, while still trying to make it look 'aesthetically film noir'. 

After having watched a few examples of expressive lighting, we arranged ourselves into groups and we assigned our roles as the director, the gaffer, the director of photography and the actor, and we rotated each time so that everyone had a turn on fulfilling a different role. This workshop allowed us to share our own creativity and apply knowledge that we had gained from previous lighting workshops to put into practice of a more advanced workshop. For the majority of our shots, we used tungsten lights which are incandescent and can expose more light onto a subject, which can be most suitable for achieving more abstract and expressive shots. When it was my turn as the director, I had to supervise two production team members (the cinematographer and the gaffer) to achieve the lighting arrangements that I wanted. However, I found this task particularly difficult because I had difficulty in trying to visualise exactly where the tungsten lights should be placed on the film set. Perhaps, I could spend more time to visualise the image I want instead of spontaneously telling my gaffer to arrange the lights where they could be; I needed to know exactly where they had to be. As I went first as the director, I did not initially think about the adjustability of the tungsten lights as they had options of narrowing the barn doors, but most especially the choice of using floodlight or spotlight. Typically, film noir tends to employ subtle, low-key spotlight on a subject's face rather than using very bright lighting, but it really depends on how you want to express a character's mood. Conventionally, characters in film noir are perpetually in an unhappy state and live in a city of trouble and chaos, which means that lighting should be arranged in such a way where a character has to not only feel but look melancholic. 

After having made these previous mistakes, I decided to employ other tools to achieve a more cinematic shot. I used the track and doll and used two tungsten lights to achieve a shot that did not really comply with film noir conventions, but instead felt a bit like an announcement of a star a guest participating in a reality television show - we were really experimenting with different lighting arrangements. After having practiced a couple of stationary shots, we put our directions project scenes to the test, but I personally did not have the opportunity to experiment with mine as most of my scenes take place outdoors. As a result, I personally would not want to use the tungsten lights, even though they can achieve astonishing imagery, but it all comes down to practicality and I would not be able to use tungsten lights outside anyways. I am mainly using natural sunlight as my main source of lighting, but I may also consider a reflector to illuminate an actor and achieve a softer and angelic aesthetic. For a night scene at the forest, I might have to use three point lighting with LEDs, but I do have to consider my other classmates who might have to use the same sort of equipment as me. Nevertheless, I felt like I gained so much valuable knowledge on lighting during this workshop, and the fact that we got to be experimental with different types of lighting allowed me to brainstorm what sort of equipment I would actually book out to use for my main directions project.