Color and Lighting

In my previous post, I mentioned that I would take the opportunity to research what approaches to color and lighting my group could take in our film opening. In today's post, I'll go over what I found relating to these two topics and how I plan on using them.

Color Theory

My partner, Edward, has previously researched color palettes, and decided to go with this one below as it is very apparent in 80's aesthetics:

These shades of magenta, cyan, yellow, purple, and red will be used to decorate the set and inform costume design desicions, but I wanted to figure out how I can also use it to convey tone and emotion through color theory. Color theory states that within film, colors presented on-screen will psychologically evoke different emotions depending on what color is used in a production. For example, seeing the color red might be associated with anger, but the color blue is associated with calmness. These infographics from No Film School explain each primary and secondary color with their mood associations:

As shown above, the same cyan as the 80's color palette can represent sadness and the magenta can represent anger. The cyan would most likely would be the best color to associate Keith Floyd, as his inner depression and loneliness is at the core of the character, with possibly some light usage of magenta to illustrate his snappy personality due to his substance abuse. This information will definitely become handy for when my group and I go thrift shopping for clothing.

Lighting Set-Ups

In film, lighting is a necesity. Lighting is how the audience will percieve the set, actors, and props presented, and different lighting techniques will vary the tone and context of a scene. Since this production is a drama, dramatic lighting is definitely a great choice for the film opening. To be specific, low key lighting. Low key lighting is a lighting technique tjat is achieved by removing the source of lighting known as the fill light, which lightly fills in details of a person's face. By removing this light, essentially half of a person's face is covered in shadow. This not only makes a scene or character seem more dramatic, but it also adds a sense of mystery. From a creative perspective, this looks like a great decision for the film opening, but is also great from a realistic perspective. With no real proper lighting equipment as of now, lighting will be scarce. Therefore, removing the amount of lights we need helps to reduce this problem.

An example of low key lighting that is typically seen in film noir.

Sources:

Hellerman, Jason. “How a Film Color Palette Can Make You a Better Filmmaker [W/ Infographics].” No Film School, 18 Feb. 2019, nofilmschool.com/Film-color-theory-and-color-schemes.

StudioBinder. “5 Cinematic Lighting Techniques Every Filmmaker Should Know.” StudioBinder, 9 Feb. 2020, www.studiobinder.com/blog/film-lighting-techniques/#Hard-film-lighting. 

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