1. Basic lighting: the three-point lighting setup
   The most basic lighting in film is the three-point lighting setup. Lighting from three directions shapes your subject and sets them apart from their background.

KEY LIGHT
The key light is the light that registers most prominently in your frame. So, when you look at the image of Amelie above, you’ll see that the screen-right portion of her face is brightest. That’s the key light.

FILL LIGHTS
Quite simply, fill lights fill in the shadows of your frame. You’ll notice that the screen-left portion of Amelie’s face is in shadow, but with her features still plainly visible. That is a fill light at work.

BACK LIGHT
The back light gives an edge light to the rear portion of your subject. Often, the backlight shoots down from a higher angle. You can see that Amelie has a light contour along her shoulders and the nape of her neck.

You’ll generally want to flank your camera with your key and fill lights, spaced about 60 degrees on an axis from your camera.

2. The cinematic types of lighting in film
   Every cinematographer is an artist who makes creative decisions on how to guide the viewer’s eye within the frame using lighting equipment. Their applications are broad, but their creative interpretation is what makes their lighting cinematic (or not).

Aperture recently published a helpful guide that shows examples of the kinds of decisions cinematographers make everyday. They include:

Which props and scene elements should be emphasized
Whose perspective we’re seeing the scene through, and how much light they should be able to see
How characters differ from one another in a frame
Which emotions are being expressed through harshness of light, or its color
Each of these decisions are then realized technically by planning and executing lighting setups to create the desired effect. But the cinematographer must dream up what these effects will be before setting up any lighting equipment.

FILM LIGHTING TECHNIQUES

3. Soft film lighting
   When talking about how a scene should feel emotionally, one thing that is referenced by cinematographers frequently is how hard or soft the lighting should be.

The hardness or softness of light concerns how large a light source is, and how it affects shadows on your subject.

HIGHER KEY LIGHT
This is an effect created by heightening the key light and using fill lights generously. This keeps the lighting bright and balanced in your frame, creating almost no shadow. This balances the lighting from object to object in your frame — which is known as your lighting ratio.

DIFFUSED OVERHEAD LIGHTING
You can soften a light source with diffusion materials like gels or Chinese lanterns to reduce shadows. This is great for conversation close-ups.

4. Hard film lighting
   Conversely, smaller light sources, including bright sunlight, will heighten the shadows on your subject. Conservatively, this should be avoided. But it can also create dramatic effects, as was popularized in the classic film noirs, which featured suspicious and volatile characters.

KICKER LIGHT WITH SOFT FILL
In this effect, the back light hits the side of your subject’s face. It can create an angelic rim of light, while a very soft fill light keeps the face gently illuminated.

LOW KEY LIGHT
Low key lighting refers to minimizing, or eliminating, the fill light your shot so that it is intentionally shadowy. This can create dramatic, suspicious, or even scary effects.

5. Motivated lighting
   When cinematographers light a set, they always ask themselves where, within the scene, the light comes from.

They might, for example, choose to take the practical lights that are already in a location and elevate their effect. This is motivated lighting.

Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins is known for the motivated lighting choices. Consider this shot from his work on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford:
Film Lighting Techniques – 3-Point Lighting – Jesse James
Motivated lighting from carried lanterns in The Assassination of Jesse James
As you can see, the lighting in this scene is motivated by the lanterns carried by the actors. When motivated lighting is done right, the audience is unaware of the artifice at work.
PRACTICAL SET LIGHTING
Film Lighting Techniques – The Quiet Dinner Table
A practical overhead bulb lights the subjects in this wide shot from The Quiet, cinematography by M. David Mullen
Often times, using existing lamps and light sockets around the set can be used to light a scene. This is referred to as practical lighting, and is particularly useful when you need to reveal wide portions of the set, or move around it in longer takes.

This was the case in the diner scene in Moonlight. In an interview for TIFF Originals, DP James Laxton spoke about how he used practical set lighting to keep his location visible in wide frames.

In essence, he swapped out the bulbs in the existing light sources around the diner to make them stronger. Since the scene reveals wide portions of their location, he relied on the practical sources, with some of LED light mattes brought in as well for additional soft, balanced light.

6. Natural film lighting
   Natural film lighting refers to using and modifying the light that is already available to you at your location.

Before you shoot, you can take your camera to the location to see how well the natural light holds up. You can decide from there how what additional lights you might need, or how you might adjust the light. For example, you can use bounce boards for reflecting the light, or black flags for blocking it out.

Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki maximized natural film lighting on Alejandro Inarritu’s The Revenant. His interview with GoldDerby is a wonderful primer on finding and controlling available light in outdoor shooting locations.

For example, he speaks about using Magic Hour, or the soft light created by the sun at the end of the day, for specific moments. And, further, he talks about how the selection of locations, and how they appear at different times of the day, created appropriate moods for the shoot.

It required a great deal of flexibility and preparation, but the results are stunning.

7. The set lighting technician’s handbook and other good reads
   Trade books can get you more comfortable with cinematography tools, common problem solving practices, and a deeper sense of how to make your vision actionable.

Here are a few that can be your lifesaver during pre-production and production:

SET LIGHTING TECHNICIAN’S HANDBOOK: FILM LIGHTING EQUIPMENT, PRACTICE, AND ELECTRICAL DISTRIBUTION
This guide puts you in the trenches of assembling lighting gear, with industry-standard techniques and hints to keep you sane during production.

SIGHT, SOUND, MOTION: APPLIED MEDIA AESTHETICS
This book takes you through the theory of creating visual imagery and how to apply them in modern production settings.

THE BARE BONES CAMERA COURSE FOR FILM AND VIDEO
A straightforward, affordable, and easy-to-understand guide to lighting and cinematography. It is a slim volume, but extremely thorough.

THE LITTLE BLACK BOOK OF LIGHTING FOR FILM AND VIDEO
Kino Flo is an industry standard light manufacturer who host this free film lighting techniques PDF on their website. Naturally, it is to be used in conjunction with their own equipment. But it takes you through many universal lighting tips and tricks for broadcast, documentaries and more.

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws speaks to a specific exhibit of faithful life anticipation, and thru its practically essential development, the image stays an idyll for blockbuster filmmaking. By mainlining straightforwardly into our most simple feelings of trepidation and wishes as moviegoers, Spielberg conveys in wide narrating tropes and boundlessly inventive proper systems, and in doing so his film is consistently comprehended. Right now, an immaculateness that has made it a fundamental great. it’s this equivalent feeling of virtue that creates the machine-like beast, the nice Carcharodon carcharias, so without human characteristics or understanding, an early stage struggle against which any watchers can revitalize. Despite and all told likelihood because of the movie’s broadly disturbed creation, Spielberg took away all superfluous parts from Peter Benchley’s top of the road novel to locate an on the spot access into our most essential enthusiastic reactions, thus showed what might later be called ‘The Spielberg Touch’— that uncanny way the manager permeates his ventures with a fast style, enchantment, and every one inclusiveness that rises above segment impediments and has since reclassified the points of Hollywood summer amusement in both positive and negative boundaries.

Broadly expounded on and dismembered by film students of history and students, there’s not really a thing to be said or expounded on Jaws that hasn’t been done as of now, then again we continue coming to the present deciding movie since it coaxes us to. Though numerous extraordinary movies contain a message or perspective that characterizes them as a results of their time or makes them stand apart inside their period, with Jaws it’s the precise inverse. In making the film, the youthful Spielberg, at that time in his mid-twenties, had no specific intention but to form the most effective picture he could. it absolutely was another person’s story, and he was entrusted to hold it to the screen. it absolutely was an occupation. His objective was essentially to be effective and convey a movie that will turn out to be a budgetary achievement. Later Spielberg would make films that were near home to him—like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Schindler’s List—yet Jaws may be a results of his sheer, unmodified ability practicing itself under the extraordinary pressure of a foul dream shoot. The experience was past exercise, really, and increasingly like an infusion of steroids that caused a powerhouse blockbuster producer.

In playing out a crude presentation of creative ability, Spielberg recounts to a story whose sense of taste comprises of essential hues: sea shores, blue water, and red blood. In any case, the shark is that the nonappearance of shading, as Robert Shaw’s fixated shark tracker Quint portrays it, “The thing a couple of shark, he has dead eyes, bruised eyes, just like a doll’s eyes. At the purpose when he comes after you, he doesn’t appear to be living until he chomps you, and people bruised eyes turn over white.” it’s a necessary animal gobbling up fundamentally great characters. Take a gander at the shark’s cheerful and guiltless early unfortunate casualties: a free-love bohemian young woman, a canine, and a bit kid. The story happens over a fourth of July occasion week on New England’s Amity Island, disturbing not exclusively everybody’s acceptable time, however putting the very vocation of the “kinship” island town (an amalgam of East Hampton, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket) at risk by ending the inflow of essential summer dollars, plenty to the frustration of the narrow minded Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton). Incidentally, however the 25-foot fish may speak to Nature, it’s by all accounts upsetting the common request of things; immediately, less a contention between Man versus Nature and progressively about dispensing with a practically inorganic monster that has interfered with the characteristic progression of Amity.

9. Nicole Kidman

Actress | Moulin Rouge!

Elegant blonde Nicole Kidman, known as one of Hollywood’s top Australian imports, was actually born in Honolulu, Hawaii, while her Australian parents were there on educational visas.

8. Marilyn Monroe

Actress | Some Like It Hot

Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, comedienne, singer, and model. She became one of the world’s most enduring iconic figures and is remembered both for her winsome embodiment of the Hollywood sex symbol and her tragic personal and professional struggles within the film industry. 

6. Natalie Portman

Actress | Black Swan

Natalie Portman is the first person born in the 1980s to have won the Academy Award for Best Actress (for Black Swan (2010)).

3. Hilary Swank

Actress | Boys Don’t Cry

Hilary was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, to Judith Kay (Clough), a secretary, and Stephen Michael Swank, who served in the National Guard and was also a traveling salesman.

7. Holly Hunter

Actress | The Piano

Holly Hunter was born in Conyers, Georgia, to Opal Marguerite (Catledge), a homemaker, and Charles Edwin Hunter, a part-time sporting goods company representative and farmer with a 250 acre farm. She is the youngest of seven children.

10. Julianne Moore

Actress | The Kids Are All Right

Julianne Moore was born Julie Anne Smith in Fort Bragg, North Carolina on December 3, 1960, the daughter of Anne (Love), a social worker, and Peter Moore Smith, a paratrooper, colonel, and later military judge.

Sound may be a really powerful tool for storytelling and giving your film impact.

Your film can include sounds that appear sort of a natural a part of the scene: waves breaking on a beach, wind blowing, and dialogue (people on screen talking). These are sometimes called diegetic sounds. Though they appear real, they don’t must be recorded live: sound effects are often better than the real thing.

Imagine you’re filming a scene within the woods with a lady walking. Your on-camera microphone will probably just acquire a confusing mush of sound. you will not be ready to hear the footsteps. Ditch the soundtrack, and use separate sound effects for birdsong, wind and also the footsteps, and your scene are going to be way more convincing. By doing this, you’re using the sounds as if they were closeups, to focus attention on important things.

If you don’t want to use artificial sound effects, get in close so you’ll be able to acquire individual sounds. In your editing program you’ll be able to detach the audio from the video and move the sounds to where you wish them. Or, even better, you’ll be able to record the sounds employing a separate audio recorder.

You can use diegetic sound that matches belongings you see on screen, just like the footsteps with the walking feet. this can be called synchronous sound. Now imagine that the camera stays on the girl, but we hear a branch snapping. Suddenly there’s tension and mystery. this sort of sound, which comes from something that’s not on the screen, is named asynchronous sound.

Soundtracks can include plenty of different elements and you’d normally build them up in layers, with different varieties of sound on different tracks.

Most films also use sound that we all know has been added: things like voiceovers, and background music. this is often called non-diegetic sound.

You can use music to line the scene and show where and when the film is ready. So a scene of an old house becomes France if you play accordion music, or the 18th century if you hear baroque music.

You can also use it to determine the mood, or change it. Deep, sinister tones tell us that something scary is on the point of happen, or that a personality who seems friendly is truly dangerous. High violin notes suggest tension, and discordant sounds make us feel uncomfortable. Fast music can add excitement to an action scene.

Hits are where the music exactly matches an action we see on the screen, though if you employ them an excessive amount ofit’s cheesy: it’s called ‘Mickey Mousing’ because it’s commonest in cartoons.

You can also use music that goes against what you see on screen. to makea way of irony, use happy music for a tragic or scary scene. this is often sometimes called contrapuntal music (as against parallel music, which matches what happens on screen.)

In a longer film, you’ll even give each character their own air or leitmotif.

Sound and editing can work together. Changing the sound and therefore the image at different times (split edits) can make a sequence flow more smoothly, because it makes the cuts less obvious. otherwise you can link two scenes employing a sound bridge. So at the top of a scene in an office we’d hear birdsong, before we movethe subsequent scene which is within the woods. This helps prepare us for the change of scene.

You can also edit your whole film or sequence to music, with the pictures changing on every bar, every beat, or when there’s a change within the mood of the music.

Don’t forget the ability of silence. A sudden change from hectic music to silence will be shocking, and some seconds of silence during a dialogue scene can build up anticipation and tension. You don’t usually want complete silence: the essential background ‘ambience’ of the placement should usually persevere.

Storyboard

Shot List

Steven Spielberg:

Date of Birth: December 18th, 1946

Biography:

Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up most of his formative years in Phoenix, Arizona. As a child, Spielberg would make short films with his Dad’s super 8 camera. The short movies inspired him to become a filmmaker, which would lead him to move to Hollywood sometime after graduating highschool. It took him some time to become a full fledge film director, he eventually landed his first minor success with the film “Duel”. This movie despite being a success did not land him another large director role until 4 years later, when he would develope what is often considered by critics to be the first summer blockbuster, “Jaws”. The movie drew audiences for weeks, and quickly became the highest growing film of all time for 2 years. This success would lead to other films such as ” Close Encounters of a Third Kind”, “1941”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, and his second highest grossing film of all time “ET”. To this day, Spielberg continues to make box office smashes, and has also received a AFI lifetime achievement award for his efforts in the motion picture industry.

The codes and conventions for war films include symbolic and technical codes. Examples of symbolic codes include the setting and the mis-en-scene. Examples of technical codes include lighting, sound and camera angles.

Symbolic Codes:

Setting: War films typically take place in battlegrounds where war has taken place. Sometimes, the film may take place in a foreign country such as Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, The Middle East etc. It also takes place in rural areas, destroyed cities, ruins, open fields of warfare, at sea, in the air, in enemy and friendly territory and strategic war locations such as forests or a desert.

Mis-en-scene: Props, Outfits, Actors

The mis-en-scene of war movies have a lot to do with the way the fighters of the war are portrayed and the types of props and settings that are typically used in war. Props include weapons, helmets, tanks, aircrafts, explosive devices, boats and ammunition. With these props, the audience automatically knows that the film is going to be a war movie and that these props are typical in war films. The props also demonstrate the full effect of the war and the damage that some of these props, such as weapons and tanks, can do to a human life and the tragedy that war truly is.

The outfits and the actors of the film also have a big effect on the movie as they ultimately set the stage for the film as to who is going to be fighting against who. The outfits are correlated with the nation that they are fighting for, for example the US Army has US war outfits and the Germans have their own German outfit. It distinguishes who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, depending on your perspective of the film and who’s side you take. The actors also have to be in good correlation with the movie and they have to have certain qualities that allow them to fit the role of a war actor. For example, Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan was a perfect example as he fit the role of an army captain perfectly and his acting in the movie was stellar. An actor such as Joaquin Phoenix would not have been able to deliver that role as effectively and arguably would have changed the whole dynamic of the film.

Technical Codes:

Camera Angles: Camera angles that are typically associated with war films are extreme wide shots, full shots, long shots, medium long shots, extreme close up, cowboy shots, close up shots and medium shots.

Lighting:

The most common lighting techniques that are typically associated with war films are low-key lighting and high-key lighting with few examples of dark and gloomy lighting.

Sound:

The sound in war films is arguably one of the most important aspects in a war film because it is what mainly draws and immerses the audience into the movie. The sound of a loud bomb going off or the bullets of a machine firing out of the magazine is what engages the audience in the combat scenes. Patriotic music can also be associated with war films as it represents what the soldiers are fighting for and gives the viewers a sense of the type of patriotism that the soldiers are fighting for.