Unit 5
Lighting

For this final task of the unit, we were asked to evaluate the lighting used in our own horror film, here's how it went.



Overall, I am quite happy with how some of the scenes were lit. Since we were mainly using practical lights, everything looked natural and in place with what we were filming. There were many shadowed areas around the set which looked nice on camera and gave a slightly eerie feeling throughout the short film. My favourite shot that used lighting was when the Mimic had the skin pulling.The lack of light had added a bit of mystery to the creature and had exaggerated some features in the face like the textured surface of the skin, making everything look a bit disgusting. This also accentuated many mixed shapes used on set and just looked like a well put together set overall. However, keeping things lit with natural and practical lights had its disadvantages. 
First of all, there wasn't much depth in the final shots, which meant that it was hard to tell whether some things were focused properly, meaning we had to do many reshoots which took up our already limited time. This then also meant that we had paid less and less attention to how the final images looked, overall making a lower quality film. This also directly caused issues with timing of filming, since we had to reshoot, we had less time to film in the evening which is when many of our scenes took place, we tried to fix this the best we could, using tin foil on windows and doors covered in black felt, however this wasn't very effective as some shots had sunlight peeking out through gaps in key scenes that were needed and was very difficult to get rid of. This led to many inconsistencies and I couldn't use as many shots as I had originally wanted to. There were also many scenes where the tone of the lighting was all over the place due to the fact we relied on the warm practical lights and the cooler natural lights from the window, meaning some scenes didn't fall in together as well as they could have, meaning a lot of colour grading was needed to fix this.
 
Id say, if i were to do the lighting in this project again, I would rely less on the practical lights and actually use more panel lights to have more control on how the scene looks. I would also focus on adding more contrast and depth to shots with the lighting as i think this would go a long way.