spectrum.rosco.com: It can be easy to get lost in low-budget horror films. From cinematography, to performance, to location – I’ve found one of the biggest challenges in film to be lighting. My passion lies in finding the right tools as a cinematographer to achieve the director’s vision.
6 comments:
One of my favorite things to look for in movies is innovative lighting. I think there are so many opportunities to enhance film with lighting, and those opportunities are often not taken. One of my favorite movies, lighting-wise and just in general, is Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. They experiment so much with colored lighting in that movie, and it creates such a powerful effect in the more emotionally impactful scenes. Similarly to Blood Sugar, Sorry to Bother You didn't have the biggest budget, but the lighting just made everything seem more expensive. I liked how this article talked about different lighting to enhance different skin tones. So often, lighting is centered around pale skin, and darker skin tones are not thought about, leaving them to be washed out. The creators of Blood Sugar really put in a lot of work to make their small budget film look expensive and scary, and I really respect that.
I always love learning about the process behind making films. It is nice to get insight on a small budget film like this and compare it to a major blockbuster film – the fixtures they used in the making of this zombie short film are remarkably cheap compared to what a major film would use. Each of the Rosco DMG fixtures costs around $300-$500 depending on the model, size, and functionality. Similar wash panel fixtures like that which don’t even have color changing capability can easily cost upwards of $5000. The quality and the control you would have with the cheaper panels likely will be lesser, but on a budget, it still looks amazing! The pictures from the film shoot in the article actually look really nice. It is always encouraging to see that productions of a budget can easily look just as good or even sometimes better than productions which have multi million dollar budgets. I would be curious to do a side by side comparison of these same shots set up with the cheap fixtures and a higher end set up to see how noticeable the quality is.
Very cool. Lighting really is one of my favorite design elements. Scenery is cool and when the magic is there it really is something else but with lighting I feel like it is the thing that brings that magic to scenery. It can hide so many of our shortcomings and mistakes that I really feel like scenic needs to give more credit and thankfulness to lighting. I really want to have a little light lab to play with one day. The one we had at my undergrad was a ton of fun to mess around in. I used to go in and set up dioramas and just kind of fuck with it to music. I feel like lights of this scale would be the perfect thing for such an endeavor if I ever wanted to set such a thing up in my home. The potentials for photography is endless with such things..
I always think that the Rosco articles are interesting, and a nice break from the seemingly endless torrent of bad news. It's really incredible how versatile the Mini Mix and DMG Dash lights are, given how compact and easy to use they are. I also thought it was really cool that they can be controlled from an app on your phone (A simple feature, I guess, but still makes it all the more useful). The pictures are a great demonstration of the (figurative) power of the lights. I found the zombie scene most impressive, because of the way it transitions from one lighting look to another. The photos may not look like much at first, but it's important to consider the budget that can go into high-end horror films - and to me, Blood Sugar looks like it's just as good. The lighting setup in the house itself is also interesting to read about, for example the newspapers in the window to act as diffusers.
I adore myself a good horror movie especially this near halloween! I remember being stunned, recently, by the rich vibrant colors in the Netflix movie Fear Street trilogy. You can truly change the atmosphere of a places through the right lighting and color grading. The article shows a beautiful shot using a pink, fuchsia light coming from the right and a indigo leaning blue coming from the left. I think that these colors show the surreal mind space that you go to when you are scared to death. The equipment used by the crew is not a little but it is SIGNIFICANTLY less than what would be used in a professional movie. I think that the mentality of creativity and resourcefulness is in full display. I also feel grateful for how having amazing colors is not something restricted to solely blockbuster films but anyone if they are crafty enough and do more research.
This looks to be a pretty powerful fixture! I have not actually heard of this fixture yet, but it sounds like the perfect tool for small films such as this one. So much of the equipment that is sold for operations like this is way out of the price range of small-scale shows, so it is nice to see a viable option at a lower cost. There are plenty of low cost options out there but much of it is extremely poor quality. With Rosco being one of the major lighting gel manufacturers, I trust that this fixture would have good color mixing because of how much they understand color. I would really like to try something like this out someday. This particular type of fixture is also super cool because it is difficult to tell where the light source is coming from. It is just being used to tone the space and add atmospheric color in a way.
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