Developing Lighting Techniques

We have continued to experiment with different types of camera angles and shots, however, feel as though we need to begin to progress further with our documentary making. We have now begun to experiment with different lightings and camera positions, for example, one the main feature we have started to use is facilities within the drama studio at school, enabling us to create an almost spot-like effect for our interviews. We were able to lighten and darken different areas, creating a silhouette outline of the interviewee, resulting in a dramtic and tense effect, something that we can incorporate into our documentary. We have continued to take into account the conventions of documentary making by ensuring the interviewee is placed to the right-hand side of the camera, allowing us to conform to the expectations of documentary making. During our experimentation stages, we have based a lot of our interviews on unstructured interviews, something that clearly works well with our chosen topic. We will begin to now experiment with other types of interviews, for instance structured interviews, as well as develop lighting techniques further to result in a realistic and interesting effect.

In order to show this, I have printscreened shots from the video shown above this post, copied and pasted this into paint and then cut the shot to create a still image. Although from these images, the lighting appears too dark and the silhouette cannot be easily identified, by looking at this on camera we were able to establish different contrasts of light and were able to find a suitbale contrast that we would potentially use within the documentary.