Field Lighting Exercise

As a part of the second semester, we had to do a Field Lighting Exercise. I teamed up with a bunch of very skilled guys - Danny, Liam and Jowayne. All of the guys brought something special into the shot. We were given the assignment to recreate a scene from Memento. Memeno as a film is very complex in the way it is lid. It has got hard shadows, and a very hight contrast. All the flashback scenes are shot in black and white, but my group and me decided that it would be a challenge to try and recreate this scenario.

The shoot was done with Dedolights and a Blackmagic Cinema Camera we were fortunate enough to borrow from a third year student. We started by tearing the scene apart piece for piece to analyse what kind of shots we were eventually going to reproduce, and then smaking a list over the different shots afterwards. It turned out to be a good idea, since moving the camera around a lot would have caused a lot of repositioning with the lights and the camera.

We were fortunate enough to have an actor on set, that had done a bit of acting before, and it took the shoot to a higher level. The took turns in setting up the lights and shooting the scenes, but mainly Liam was in charge of the camera, and I in charge of the lights.

Along the way we encountered trouble, as the medium we shot on wasn't formatted correctly, which caused all our hard work to go to waste. Fortunately enough,  Danny was able to stitch together the pieces we had, and smooth them out.

In retrospect, I think we should have shot the whole thing in ProRes 422 instead of RAW. ProRes is easier on the SSD drive it records to, and therefore we might have had some uasble footage.

The final result can be seen here: