Lighting for Magic Bullet

Aaliyah CHARACTER DESCRIPTION:

a twenty year old girl struggling with her depression identity and mental stability

LIGHTING

With Aaliyah, due to character interpretation and dialogue (aims of lighting), I wanted to film at night so the amount of light being admitted in the present scene would be a medium between hard and soft. The intensity of the shot was rather archaic as the white balancing on my DSLR was set to 1+ and my shutter was adjusted to 1/100 low light setting which defined any shadowing in the frame and accented the person speaking (the backlighting in the alleyway was provided by a streetlight that highlighted said subject) and provided me with three shot lighting. Though I didn’t have any external lighting equipment, I set the camera to manual which helped me to get a clean looking cut despite the lack of resources I had been equipped with. On the bus, I used an automatic camera setting as the vehicle kept moving thus bumping my camera around and changing the way the light appeared on screen.

In the shot of her walking, I changed the the shutter setting to a ratio of 1:50 as there was insufficient exposure in reality.

I wanted the exposure to be high, to portray the protagonist as making light out of her situation.

Maya CHARACTER DESCRIPTION:

A young girl suffering from bronchitis and an addictive smile

Tatum CHARACTER DESCRIPTION

A teenager suffering from chronic pain and cool hair

I used natural lighting with Maya and Tatum. I did not change any of my camera’s settings except the O.I.S as I still needed stable shots and the white balance back to 0 as I wanted natural shadowing to appear in the frame. I used settings with Aaliyah as her part was shot at night but I hardly needed to adjust my settings at all in the daytime as I want my film to appear roughly documented.