Major Project: Lighting Test Shoot

Today me and Jack went to test shoot for an interview set up. Having learned from several issues with shadows and a lot of (although intentional) headroom we decided to test the style of interview used in TIME: The Kalief Browder Story. After previously testing out the style used in BBC’s Reported Missing I have found that this style may not work for our project. After discussing the style with Ferg, he said it looked amateurish and I couldn’t disagree. Before I was very conscious that it may have been a stylistic choice and that could be true but there is no information around on this and it appears that it was a small production team without a director according to IMDB. With this in mind, it could be that having no specialists to compose the interview, the just shot what they thought to be a good setup with no strong intentions behind breaking conventions. 

Looking at the way interviews are shot with TIME: The Kalief Browder Story, each of the interviews are shot in a different way with different framing, different depths of field. For our interviews, I feel having a shallow depth of field really creates a focus on the subject and embellishes the cinematic look we are going for. We tested the three points of lighting that we went through with Sam Creamer for the perfect interview and this turned out to be an effective way of testing the lights out. In achieving the perfect setup for an interview, and to be more efficient in practice it is very important to test shoot. On location, we won't have a lot of time to experiment so if we go in with a draw up plan of what we want, we can plan more effectively. This is especially important for two reasons, both of which are affected by the budget and locations: 

1. We cant return to locations to film- our shoots are very far out and to afford the journey and equipment hire and time of contributors, re-shooting would be near impossible for us. 

2. We cant recce locations- we would struggle to afford to travel up to recce locations and our budget wouldn't allow another journey. If we were with a bigger production company. we would consider sending someone over to recce and produced all was well we would follow them up to film. This is something I learned whilst working with GooWoo Media. When shooting the show Celebrity Road Trip: Lost in Transylvania, they sent the production manager over to Romania before the entire crew joined him a few days later, just to recce locations and meet the contributors in person.   

For these reasons, we really want to test shoot as much as possible and practice really does make perfect. By breaking down the footage and playing around with the lighting will enable us to really establish what is going well and what would make it better. This is also why we will also be test shooting with the Black Magic URSA camera which we intend to film with. Experimenting different cameras ensures we make the right equipment choices. Below is the lighting plan I drew up for this test shoot to determine the lighting setup.


Lighting Plan:



In this lighting test shoot, we set about to try and work out exactly the correct setup:
This was a very successful lighting test shoot all in all and I belive a good level of brighhtness to stick to with the LED's is 75%. Anything above this we found to be too bright and over-exposed. Having tested this lighting setup we have concluded that it does work very well, and is a definite improvement from previous interview test shoots. I believe this room was also a good environment to do this in as the natural light could be controlled with blackout blinds. This meant that we could test out the worse case scenario of not having any natural light in an interview to see how that would come off.







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