Films with similar lighting to ours

After being inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's use of colour I developed this idea much further.  We chose to light our film with vibrant and vivid colours. The reason for this is to explicitly project emotions to the viewers and set a visual atmosphere for the scene. There are a few films that relate to this idea such as ‘Mania by The Weekend’, ‘Suicide Squad’, and the red lighting scenes in Martin Scorsese films. All these films use vivid colour lighting to portray on screen emotions to the viewers.

‘Mania’ by The Weekend uses colours such as red and blue, with undertones of green, purple and pink to express the intensity of emotions he is going through as he transitions from scene to scene. He uses red for example to show lust and blue to show tension. Green is used in the bathroom urinals to show grossness, and purple is used to show the binding of love. In addition, the intense use of lighting in his film is used to divert the viewers’ attention from minute details such as hair colours and eye colour of an actor to prevent distraction or minor infractions in attention. Colours are used to wash out all unnecessary details and replace them with a deeper concentration on shapes and movement within the scene. Martin Scorsese is known to do the same thing in certain scenes of his films. They are called red scenes, because he washes out the scene a red filter over the camera lens to project the emotion of fear and anger. For example, in the movie Good Fellas, in a scene where two characters must bury a body quickly before being caught, the scene is red with a white back-light to emphasis the red.

 

‘Suicide squad’ however uses colours to amplify minute details, adding accents to things the eye wouldn’t notice, for example, in the opening credits, the Warner Bros logo is illuminated from the back, projecting colour from the edges, a common person would not be focusing on the edges of a logo, however now that it is illuminating colour, it amplifies the visual aesthetics of said logo. Even throughout the film the Jockers car has underbelly lighting projecting on the surrounding floor, again showing a place someone usually wouldn’t take notice to, and amplifying it so it changes the visual aesthetics of the whole subject.

 

For our film, we will be balancing between the effects show in ‘Mania’ and ‘Suicide Squad’ the coloured lighting won’t be as intense and washing out as the lights found in ‘Mania’. On the other hand, they won’t be as discrete and subliminal as the colours found in ‘Suicide Squad’. The lights in our film will be geared more towards Mania, but will have some subliminal aspects such as the ones found in ‘Suicide Squad’. To achieve these effects we will most likely be using projectors with colour gels placed in front, and some coloured soft boxes to achieve the colour accents.