Over the past few days my group and I were given the task of creating a 'Film Noir' music video between 1-2 minutes. To begin with this seemed impossible because there is no music video that entirely uses the conventions from 'Film Noir'. However we were pretty positive when it came to creating this because we wanted to focus on lighting instead of a narrative that fitted with a sound track. This is why we chose the song Darude Sandstorm; the music video for this song is terrible and involves someone running around with a briefcase being chased by some bad guys. Our video was a spoof of this because it was such a simple idea, which we could easily adopt.
Grainy soft black and white look in order to connote mystery and set a time and era for the video. We wanted to cancel out digital noise because this looks like a sickly grain. On the other hand we wanted grain to be added in post so we tried to minimize noise by lighting the scene as much as we could while still maintaining a dark look. We used the three point lighting technique with one key light, a back light and a fill light. Our fill and or key light was mainly our phones torches but we did use a big light as a back light and spot light.
Shadows played a key role in selling the idea of 'Film Noir' to achieve shadows we used artificial light in order to create vast amounts of light in a given direction. This worked well with most of the shots however some shots required light in more than one place in order for it to work. I enjoyed experimenting with light because it provided us with new angles to try in order to get the shadow. Further it allowed for a bright light transition, which I feel made it more visually abstract much like German Expressionism.
As a group we faced many challenges, first one being time. The reason was is we only had a two day window before we broke up to do this, therefore we had to come up with an idea on the spot and stick with it. Our next problem was light, because the school was so bright we had to get creative in how to make it look dark. Firstly we chose two of the closed off areas in the school: the hall stage and art fire exit. Then we re-lit it under low key lighting in order to give it a dark and mysterious tone. This involved blocking out natural light from windows etc. Our goal was to use the shadows and angles to create a sense of confusion and mystery.
Final improvements would be firstly to use mounts for the camera in order to keep the movement smooth and calculated while being handheld. Secondly to think about timing with the music and pacing of footage. Finally to gain experience in lighting a scene in the dark and figuring out how to get the slits in film noir because we tried many different things to try and make it work but it didn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment