♥ Jocelyn Teng ♥: Contextual Studies: Contextual Visuals

Visual interpretation

There are few aspects that we look into while interpretation.

i. Lighting

As a beginner of shooting the film noir, I researched the basics of lighting for film noir.

There are three main lights that are important:

a. Key Light - brightest and the most dominant

b. Back Light - Separate the objects and background

c. Fill Light - only use it while necessary, complementing the key light

I would like to use symbols to designate the different lights.

The characteristics of each of these lightings

Bring in the KEY LIGHT

Bring in the FILL LIGHT

Bring in the BACK LIGHT

Some classic examples of film noir lighting come from movies such as The Third Man, with the long cast shadows on the walls of the dimly lit streets along with the dutch tilted angle of the scene.

The Third Man - Long Shadows, Dark Streets, Running Man

The Third Man - Long Shadows, Dark Streets, Balloon Peddler

Another great example of Film Noir lighting in a movie is High Sierra, in which the lighting was done to look as if lit by an oil lamp.

High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino

The low lighting is low in this scene and gives away the feelings the two characters have for each other. The lightning is not as low as in criminal lighting where the light would be coming from the floor, but lower as in the height of the oil lamp itself to make it look realistic.

Another type of film noir imaging is silhouetting of the characters against a light background such as in the The Big Combo.

Low-key Lighting

The low-key lighting schemes of many classic film noirs are associated with stark light/dark contrasts and dramatic shadow patterning, a style known as chiaroscuro.

In traditional lighting, three-point lighting uses a key light, a fill light, and a back light for even illumination. Low-key lighting requires only one key light, optionally controlled with a fill light or a simple reflector.

Low-key Lighting (Interiors)

Out of the Past (1947)

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

The Killers (1946)

Night-for Night Low-Key Lighting (Exteriors)

Double Indemnity(1944)

The Killers(1946)

Deep Focus

Deep Focus is a style or technique of cinematography and staging with great depth of field, preferred by realists, that uses lightning, relatively wide angle lenses and small lens apertures to simultaneously render in sharp focus both close and distant planes (including the three levels of foreground, middle-ground, and extreme background objects) in the same shot: contrast to shallow focus (in which only one plane is in sharp focus).

Examples of deep focus

The Night of the Hunter (1955)