Light Research

In order to make our film more effective, we decided to try and play with light and reflection. This would add to creating a sense of ambiguity for our film. This is also conventional of thrillers as it creates a sense of entrapment as the audience is only given a limited view of the scene, as opposed to being able to see everything in the shot. Our group decided to take some pictures in our location to view how we could experiment with light:

As you can see here, the corridor is lit very brightly, creating a clinical sense to the shot. We felt that this would expose too much of the surroundings as we want our opening to happen in an unknown location. This amount of light would make the film appear more like a drama rather than a thriller as it is simply not dark and limiting enough. However, the reflection of the light on the floor could be used to symbolise some sort of urgency; seeing as our opening will be more slow paced, we decided that this wasn't necessary. 



Although we weren't able to fully make the corridor darker, you can see a clear difference between the two pictures. The shadows in the dim lit corridor make it appear more spooky which is exactly what we want -  a remote, isolated location. The shadows make the corridor appear intimidating which is why we think that the darkness of it would expose the bold, formal structure to it, adding to the eeriness of the shot. The problem area of this shot is the fact that there is a lot of natural light coming in, despite the fact that we have turned most of the lights in the corridor off - this is something we should consider when filming.


Through looking at the use of light in our project we have come across some things which we will need to remember to do in order to make our work more effective:
1) Make sure that the light is evenly distributed - this means that we should probably aim for making sure that most if not all of the lights in the corridors are switched off
2) Make sure to film after lessons - this would give more darkness to the shot as there would be no natural light coming in to the shot. This is also important as we found that a lot of people were moving across the corridor, slowing down our progress.