Lighting types

Key Lighting - The purpose of the key light is to highlight the form and dimension of the subject. The key light isn't a rigid requirement. Omitting the key light can give off a silhouette effect. Key lights may be placed in a scene to illuminate a moving subject at opportune moments.

Fill light - may be used to reduce the contrast of a scene and provide some illumination for the areas of the image that are in shadow. A common lighting setup places the fill light on the lens axis, roughly perpendicular to the key light. The fill light is often softer and, by definition, less intense than the key light.

The purpose of back light is to illuminate the subject from behind, it can be natural or artificial light. The viewer and the back light face each other with the subject in between them, as a result the subject appears glowy around the edges (halo effect) and some parts may appear shadowed. It can be used to create a silhouette effect.

High-lighting: High lighting aims to reduce the lighting ratio present in the scene. High lighting is used to suggest an upbeat mood. It is often used in sitcoms and comedies.

Rim lighting - is often used when making profile portraits.  Rim lighting is the similar as backlighting, where the subject is lighted from behind causing the facial features of the profile to be highlighted.

Chiaroscuro Lighting - Is characterized by strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition.

British Film Awards Nominations

Kings speech:

story and plot is entirely British based, relates to real event about a King of England (King George VI)

Actors are mainly English, with the 'star' actor being Colin Firth, who is English.

Director is Tom Hooper, who is English.

Style of the film is very dialogue based – associated with the English, also what critics like.

Genre of film is a drama – once agin British critics enjoy this genre of film

received funding from a British based company – UK film council

127 hours:

story and plot don't really relate to British subject matter

cast are not British

Director is well known and very talented – Danny Boyle

style and genre of film doesn't relate too well to Britishness

however major achievement for film in how it managed to keep audience interested for long time when nothing was really happening.

Received some funding from Film4 – British based

critics mainly focused on exploits of director – who is English – very good reviews

another year:

whole of the cast is English

director is English – Mike Leigh

Mike was given highly rated reviews

received funding from the UK film council

the genre of the film is comedy drama – typical british genre

four lions:

plot relates to England – set in England with issues about terrorism

Cast is nearly all English

Director is English – Chris Morris

Production companies are mainly English

genre is a black comedy – not associated with typical English films  

Working Title Films day trip

Harriet Spencer: assistant to Debra Hayward, has a very recent view of how to enter the industry at an entry level.

Harriet and Emma, an intern, talked mainly about ways in how to enter this type of industry. They explained that it was not necessarily dependent on having a film or media type degree, but mainly about getting experience, through things such as film society's and work experience.  

Working Title Films day trip

Sarah Jane Wright: production executive in charge of physical production.

We later talked to the person who was head of department for physical production – Sarah Jane Wright. She talked about how to keep the budget of the film down, with there being a variety of ways, one of these being to try and film in England, and if not close to England or Places that can be diverse, such as hungary where cities such as Budapest can resemble other cities such as london, rome or paris. She later talked about how to make the most of the tax rebate, with films costing under £20 million having a tax rebate of 20%, compared to Hungary where it is 25%.  

Working Title Films day trip

Tim Bevan: co-chair with Eric Fellner of Working Title Films: we talked to Tim Bevan about his role within Working Title Films and also about the role of the company itself. We then got talking about the funding involved, and found that universal pictures funds most of their projects and staff – universal pictures their partner company. He later wen on to talk about how big the production line for Working Titles Films is, and how they have around 50 films on the go, ranging from the idea stage, tot he editing stage – we later learnt that the average number of films that are produced yearly is 3-4.

There was then a question about piracy, and Tim replied that 'film is a big big fu**ing business', and that to avoid the route of the music industry, they were looking into new ideas I order to try and make films more accessible and cheap – one way in which he suggested was the creation of a cheap online film viewing service that would help to combat film piracy.

Tim then answered a different question, this time regarding the difficulties which may be caused by having different genres of films being made at the same time, in which he replied that yes there could be difficulties when switching between the two, but that in this type of job you need o be able to effectively do this. An example he gave was the editing of Johnny English 2 in one room and in the room next door the editing of a serious MI5 film.

When asked about his favourite part of creating a film he had two responses, for the first one he said his favourite part was the creation stage, when the ideas were flowing, and the other response was just before filming commenced, when all that cast, crew etc had been assembled and in his mind the film would and was perfect.