Pre-production Planning: Lighting By Holly King

• For the majority of our short film we will be Using Ambient Lighting because most of our short film will be filmed outside in daylight and so will need to look realistic and natural.
• The ambient ligthting will also create a sense of normality and realism. It adds to the fact that we are using observational camera work, and other lighting effects (such as low key lighting) are subjective and create a mysterious, melencholic mood however this is not the effect we want throughout the majority of the short film.

Example Showing Natural/Ambient Lighting

• Towards the end of the short film however, (When the boy is sitting alone in his room) we will experiment with using Low Key lighting. This is because low key/dark lighting creates a dark, melancholic mood and is also more subjective so the viewer is able to empathise with the character more and this is what we wish to achieve at the end of our short film when you realise that the friend had died and was being imagined by the boy.
• The low key lighting can also give quite a distorted, surreal mood. Which is significant as the boy has been imagining his friend the whole time (giving a distorted sense of reality).



Example showing Low Key lighting

• We Could Create Low Key Lighting using an umbrella light. This lighting was used in our AS Media thriller work and we feel works successfully.

Image of umbrella lighting which could be used to create low key lighting