How to Create Suspense with Lighting
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Lighting for nighttime exteriors is one of the most common challenges you’ll face in cinematography. How you choose to motivate lighting, whether from the moon, from street lights, or from something else altogether, will significantly change the feeling of a scene. In horror films, there is more flexibility in the lighting because the goal is to be as immersive as possible. Today, director of photography Jon Salmon walks us through how to shoot a night exterior horror scene. In the scene, he uses shadows and motivated lighting to create tension.
In this video, Jon shows us the steps he takes when shooting a night exterior horror scene.
First, he places lights that are motivated from practical sources in the location. For this location the lighting was done to enhance the moonlight and the lights coming from the pool. Next, he pushed in on the first shot to get a close-up of the character’s reaction. This was he was also about to see the imperfections of the lighting from the wide. Lastly, he moved the camera around for the reverse POV of the character, to see the monster in the water. This was done with minimal lighting to create mystery around the monster.
The main techniques we will be discussing today are using shadows, using fog to obscure the background, and using foreground elements. Using shadow is important in horror because it is an easy way to obscure characters and other details. This allows the audience to fill in the rest with their imagination. Using fog is another good way to obscure information in the background by making the scene hazy. This movement of the fog can also add a creepy feeling to a location. Foreground elements are anything that between the camera and the subject, such as a wall, rocks, or a bush. Having these elements in the frame can make it feel like the character is being watched.
Horror is one of the most exciting genres in film because it allows you to play into the audience’s perceptions. The lighting in horror can be much more stylized which gives you more artistic expression. No matter how you light it, the essence of horror is the same, and that is making your audience as tense as possible using only picture and sound. As filmmakers this is one of the most exciting challenges we face. There are limitless was to use lighting to help tell your horror story, it’s up to you to find the best one.
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Watch video How to Create Suspense with Lighting online without registration, duration hours minute second in high quality. This video was added by user Aputure 06 September 2019, don't forget to share it with your friends and acquaintances, it has been viewed on our site 51,98 once and liked it 1.7 thousand people.