Lighting in Film: Source

Lighting is a crucial element when creating a film and this is because it obviously helps audiences to see what is happening and with the right lighting techniques, it helps to enhance the mood of certain scenes, giving the right tone to the film in general. In this blog, the techniques of lighting will be discussed in one of four different key factors, direction, quality, source, and color as well as the name of the person in charge of lighting and the responsibilities the title has.

In charge of the lighting in film is the cinematographer. With the first job of a cinematographer already mentioned, the two other things that the cinematographer is in charge of are the looks and color of the shots and for framing every single shot of the film.

Sources in lighting revolve around where the light comes from or what produces the light on-set. Like all other categories and elements of film, lighting enhances the genre of the film and gives audiences the correct mood. There are different types of lighting sources including practical and natural lighting. The next paragraph will discuss what those types of lighting sources are and how media producers use them.

Practical lighting, also known as artificial lighting, and natural lighting are also qualities of lighting in film. Practical lighting is defined as light coming from a man-made source, which is the reason for the name "artificial lighting". Natural lighting is self-explanatory, meaning that the light in a scene is coming from a source like the sun, a fire, etc. Filmmaker use practical lighting sometimes because the natural lighting is not bright enough or other times because they need to direct the lighting to a certain position. Natural lighting is used to give the audience a feeling that the movie is realistic and sometimes they need to improvise and use natural lighting instead of practical lighting.