Friday 18 November 2011

Resit: Lighting

I needed to look at lighting used in horror films so that I could understand how to follow generic conventions in regards of lighting in our own horror film opening.
I analysed 2 different horror film openings and only looked at the lighting used. In both of these the lighting was simliar it was low key this helped to create a eerie suspicious and overal scary atmosphere. The generic conventions of horror film lighting is low key to create this scary atmosphere.
Just to check that this is what my target audience expect to see in a horror film opening I asked 10 people what kind of lighting they would expect to see in a horror genre movie.

What kind of lighting woud you expect to see in the opening credits of a horror movie?

Dark - 10

All 10 people asked answered the same that the lighting must be low key as this creates a scary effect to the audience and creates the correct atmosphere needed for a horror film.

Now that I have found out this information I needed to think how I can apply this to my groups horror opening. As we are are aiming to create a film opening of the Horror genre the target audience expect to see low key lighting used so when filming our piece we need to ensure it is not in a light area we need to make sure it is dark otherwise this would not fit in with the horror genre conventions needed and will not create a scary atmosphere to the audience.

Below is a clip from http://www.youtube.com/ showing the low key lighting used in horror films:



You can see from this opening scene the lighting used is low key creating a scary atmosphere to the audience.

I have 2 pictures of locations one a night and one during the day this will show the effect that low key lighting has when creating a scary atmosphere to the audience.

Picture 1) Light:                                                            Picture 2) Dark



















Im sure you will agree that picture 2 has a much more scary effect this is because of the use of low key lighting. So to ensure that I create the correct effect on my audience I need to use low key lighting as this makes everything look more eerie and suspicious and therefore creates a scary worrying atmosphere.

Alex Cockburn

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