Research: Mise En Scene - Lighting & Colour (Miss B)

Lighting & Colour

Lighting helps to convey mood and atmosphere, and can be used to guide the audience's attention to a particular subject, person, emotion or genre. Lighting creates more meaning than we think. Without lighting, watching a movie could become tedious and too predictable. Lighting also helps with realism - if a scene during the night is expected, the lighting should imitate nighttime. 

Colours have different connotations which give different interpretations of the scene. Certain colours symbolize certain things - for example, when we see red we think of danger, love, blood, heat, fire. Without colour, characters' emotions might not transmit to the audience as effectively.

LIGHTING

Angles Of Lighting

Under Lighting |  Source of light coming from below the character, effect includes the illusion of distortion.

Top Lighting | Source of light coming from above the character, effect includes highlighting facial features.

Back Lighting | Source of light coming from behind the person - creating silhouettes and provoking suspicion/mystery/and at times, fear.  

Types Of Lighting

Low-key | Dark with small areas of light, creating shadow and drawing attention to items of importance, facial detail. Often used in action or comedy movies.

High-key | Appears more natural and realistic to our eyes, the effect of the lighting is heightened. Often used in psychological, slasher or sci-fi movies.

COLOUR

The denotation of something, such as it's colour, opens doors to many possibilities of a connotation. Because the symbolism of colours are programmed into our awareness, they play a part in representing the genre as conventions. 

The Moon In The Gutter - Scene Analysis

As the moon is shown, it's obviously night-time. The lighting is low-key, with an overall darkness to represent the night, but spotlights on the characters. It doesn't just represent the atmosphere - darkness brings 'black' to mind, and in thrillers, the antagonist almost always wears black or very dark clothing. Black is an unhappy colour, most weapons are black, we mourn in black, so the fact that the sky is indeed black, gives off the impression that there is evil and yet-to-be misery in the air. In this sense, the lighting and colour have been cleverly combined to create a joint effect.

As the woman is moving, there is often a back lighting, and as she turns to face the man, it hits her face. However, we can't see her face because it's turned, so it castes dense shadows around her cheekbones and facial structure. This could be an attempt to make her look older, which she ironically will never get to experience because, as to be expected, she will die. The audience may overlook this and see the lighting as a simple shadowy effect to up the mysteriousness of the killer - if you can't see her whole face, you definitely won't see any of his.

The colour of her dress is white - representing youth and innocence. Again, the youth of her character will be permanent even when the dress decays and loses it's colour - which is white, a typical and safe choice to use for a female victim. 

At 0:45, a red under lighting covers her whole character. Red represents blood, danger, but also love and seduction. We could make the assumption purely from this shot that somebody wants to shed her blood for being overly seductive - look at how the red drapes OVER her dress and skin.

There is plenty of more red throughout the entire scene; at 1:00 a subtle reflection in the water of red, clearly foreshadowing her real blood to be spilled. In the beginning, the red covering the moon; blotting out it's white, pure light and replacing it with what we commonly associate with evil. And near the end, when we see her blood on the floor and the reflection of the moon inside it - an imitation of the first shot. A velvet-like material falls to the ground, red. This could represent her real dress soaked in blood and ridden of safety, purity.

CONCLUSION | I have, using my knowledge of the new key terms, noticed/identified incredibly clever techniques to spark up a worthwhile response - such as the red reflected in the water. What could that have been from? Did they fast-forward, and was that actually her blood we saw? I think questions like these are important because it;s the audience who asks them and it's the audience who finds out; by continuing to watch. 

I argue that under/back lighting is more important than top lighting for a thriller opening, because it was used so much in this scene and worked. Low-key lighting I think would also benefit my grade because, generally, they adapt to thrillers more.