Stranger - Lighting Notes
This is a movie taking in place 4000 B.C. and it’s filled with weird languages, violence and “magical” creatures, and I feel that the lighting should help make this believable and relatable - like it’s happening in a real, physical world. So we should embrace naturalism as much as possible and figure out how we shape the natural light (or at least make it seem very natural) rather than going for a classic “hollywood aesthetic”.
Daylight references
I like the naturalism in these references. The light is never flat and some times even quite dramatic, but it retains its natural look. I hope that with bounce and negatives, we’ll be able to achieve much of the same effect.
If we need to bring in some film-lights for daylight scenes (for longer, static dialogue scenes for example) we should make sure to keep the natural look.
Night / Fire references
Just as with the daylight, I want the lighting at night to be believable. In my mind we should try and avoid artificial moonlight and block around fire instead. This is for a couple of reasons: Budget and realism. Budgetwise I have a hard time seeing how to make a believable moonlight source without going for condors and moonboxes, and since we’re shooting inside dense forest areas it will be very hard to reach - BUT I’m not at all opposed to talk about different approaches. Secondly I feel like it's more realistic to let darkness remain dark at night - if you’re outside at night, looking into a bonfire, you won’t be able to see moonlight at all. However this is all very theoretical and we’ll need to test it. Do we go LED, Tungsten flickerbox or real practical fire? The answer is probably a mix.
Forest Fire References
The forest fire sequence is still the least fleshed out and something I would LOVE to discuss with the Gaffer, since it’s very much a matter of practical limitations and figuring out how to work around them.
Mushroom Trip
Colors, flashing lights, camera movement and particles…