Thursday, 24 November 2011

3.0 - Value Study: Sin City

In order for our eyes to make sense of what we see, everything must have value. In film in particular the audience is drawn to certain parts of each shot. Some shots are only 2-3 seconds long so they must be read quickly and clearly. Below are some shots that I have taken from Sin City and tried to make sense of the light setup using UDK. Using scenes from Sin City this will help my understanding of light setups that I can then apply to my own environments.

The image below from the intro scene. What caught my with this shot is how even though the woman in the red dress stands out as it's the only area with colour at all, the lights in the background are so vibrant. Although our eyes are drawn to it at the same time we look away because of the brightness.



Below I have recreated the same scene using UDK. I put down a number of point lights (brightness at 18.00) for an intense effect, also I applied DOF (Depth of field) to give the lights that blurring effect. The scene has also been saturated to 1.0 so that everything is black and white. Although looking at this intensity does give you a sore head quite quickly so I'll need to be careful if I use this in any of the tests carried out by participants.

This is an alley scene with Bruce Willis where he confronts a gang of thugs. What was striking for me in this scene was with just a few simple lights we can very quickly pickup what the setting is. A back light picks up the silhouette of the character and the bright at the right leads your eye as well as the character in the direction to travel.



The hardest part with this shot was getting the silhouette of the character (object) to work. The light at the back wasn't project far enough to catch the character so a point light was placed just above the object. This made me realize that all the lights in a scene don't necessarily have to look as though they come from a light source but can be used to exaggerate concentration of light projections. Also the strong light on the right was a spotlight that I placed with a brightness of 24.00.

What is nice about the shot below there is a strong contrast in the characters; one is hit with the back light more than the other possibly suggesting leader out of both? While the other remains silhouetted probably there as support. But the light source is really strong again and we get a clear understanding what everything is.



I used a point light to show the wall then I used a spot light which was placed just at the bottom of the wall with an made the outer cone of the light projection roughly 44.00. What isn't show in this image is that there looks to be another light source at the opposite side of the car which is why we can see the alloy wheels.

Mickey Rourke who plays as Marv in Sin City who gets taken out a bar at gunpoint who is about to take his revenge at the back of this alleyway. I like how the darkness of the walls frames the scene where the main performance is going to take place at the steps.




It was difficult to make the walls really dark while trying to show the same light information. Similiar to the the alleyway with Bruce Willis there was an un-natural light source place on the steps at the bottom right to emphasis brightness. There is an inner light at the back to make the room stand out more. Again there is more silhouettes of the characters. The outer cone light projections maybe could have been reduced so we could see more shadows in the walls.

Dwight (Clive Owen) defends his love Shellie (Brittany Murphy) from Jackie (Benicio Del Toro) when Jackie goes to the toilet where Dwight comes from the shower curtains and threatens and tells him to leave and never come back.



We see from the light setup the silohuette on the floor there is an arugment going on in the kitchen but something else is happening in the toilet (toilet having the brightest light). I thought the way that the light setup has been arranged its telling a number of stories at the one time without any dialogue. I used 2 point lights to setup the light on the wall, with a really bright point light in the toilet and finally a spot light at the end of the corridor. 

Doing these light setups from these shots in Sin City has made me realise that light can tell a huge part of a story without the need of dialogue or action but also it helps guide the viewers eyes as where the action is taking place.

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