Understanding How Lighting Affects Mood in Film
Various lighting techniques are used throughout filmmaking to produce certain emotions or to entice particular moods, especially in regards to eliciting a particular response from the audience.
Excellent, well-thought out and perfectly planned lighting is essential to developing the desired mood among the audience. In fact, it’s very important for cinematographers to understand how lighting affects mood in film so that they can maximize their use of various forms and styles of lighting as well as various lighting techniques in order to achieve the desired mood.
Lighting Concepts
Before any filmmaker can impact the mood of their audience through various lighting techniques and tricks they’ve got to understand the individual lighting concepts that they can put to use on the set.
Things like lighting intensity, color, direction, and contrast can all impact the audience’s mood.
The color of lighting, can directly impact the way the audience thinks and feels.
Cool lighting is calming and relaxing, but can also result in a sad or somber mood.
Warmer lighting can produce feelings of increased arousal.
Which may include:
A variety of emotions such as job, anger, or aggravation depending largely on various other elements included within the scene.
The intensity of the lighting impacts the audience’s mood in film.
Lower lighting sets the scene for a romantic setting or a calm conversation.
Hard lights can be used to produce distinct shadows to build up intensity and produce feelings of tension or unease.
When it comes to understanding how lighting affects mood in film, the direction and level of lighting contrast can also impact how the audience feels setting the mood for the scene whether it’s good or bad.
Pointing a light directly toward a particular object can produce distinct hardness and may elicit a firm or otherwise subjective mood from the audience.
Likewise, when lighting is used to produce silhouettes, particular of the antagonist, or to create shadows which hide the individual that may be otherwise lurking in the background, the mood can be fearful or anxious.
Light Quality
The quality of the light can impact the mood of the audience, too.
In fact, filmmakers understand how lighting affects mood in film to the extent that they know when it’s best to utilize hard light, soft light, low light, and otherwise bright light, throughout the film in order to elicit the desired audience mood.
Hard light tests the audience creating a sense of tension or anxiety .
Soft lighting can create a more relaxed audience.
Filmmakers control the quality of the light within a scene by using a variety of different lighting sources as well as by making adjustments to the location of the lighting in relation to other objects, and the subject, within the scene.
These are just a few of the many ways that a filmmaker knows how lighting affects mood in film.