Practical Task - Lighting Checks

For this Practical Task I decided to look into lighting. As we have decided the location for our film opening I felt it would be useful to scout the location a couple times at different times in the day. This would allow me to look at how light or dark it is and work out what the best time to film would be to ensure it looked dark and eerie when filming, but also ensure that everything was still easily visible in the images and videos.

I visited the location twice at 10am and 3pm and compared the lighting in the images I took. Here are a few images from when I scouted the location at 10am.

When visiting the location at this time the lighting was very bright, making the woods feel very open but also creating lots of dark shadows in the woods, although these shadows would be effective when filming there wasn't enough to create the dark and eerie atmosphere needed for our film opening as the light shone through the trees and lit the woods very well. As we want our film opening to look as though it is set in the night we must film at a later time when it is slightly darker to make it look like dusk in our film opening, making this an unsuitable time to film our opening scene.

I then visited the location again at 3pm and took the following shots:

At this time the location was a lot darker and the light was very dull and low. This created an eerie and creepy atmosphere. This was further enhanced by the cloud cover which made the woods darker. I think that this would be a suitable time to film our opening scene as the lighting was low and dull creating the atmosphere we want in our opening scene but will still allow us to ensure that the filming is successful and that everything can easily be seen when watched back. If we wanted the atmosphere of the location to be slightly different then we could prepare to film slightly earlier or later than this time in order to get the lighting that we need and want when filming.

I feel that we should visit the location slightly earlier than 3pm as the light quickly fades and it becomes dark very quickly at the location. I feel that in order to film everything in one session then we would need to visit the woods at roughly 1pm. Although this may affect the lighting slightly, it will mean that we have more time to film our film opening and ensure that we get everything completed.