HEART CHOCOLATE

LIGHTING & COLOUR

VISUAL PRODUCTION

EXPERIMENTS

By coincidence, one of my friends had access to three Aputure 120ds over the weekend as part of her own film. We set them up in the kitchen and experimented with different colour gels.

I took advantage of this opportunity to visualise how the kitchen might look under different lighting.

The purple, pink and orange lighting most appeals to me, it represents warmth and has nice visual contrast. This might be the lighting I suggest for our project.

Blue is far too cool on it's own and one colour like blue or purple washes out all other colours and reduces contrast.

When under the orange and yellow gels, the scene felt like it was lit straight out of a typical Texas / Mexico look from America (a la Breaking Bad).

The cracked lens on my phone looks as if we are viewing it through a dreamy filter! Right: a china ball.

OUR LIGHTING DESIGN

We presented our ideas to Paul, who suggested making the purple lighting more subtle. He pointed us to research colour theory in advertisement. For example, Cadburys might use the colour purple in the background, on clothing and elsewhere as it is an important colour in identifying their brand.

This shifted my idea into something more aligned with a product promotional video or TVC. We can shoot with the process as the main focus, with less focus on the person making the hot chocolate.

I would use a dark background, with the ingredients, equipment and mug lit with a spotlight and varied colour accents. Purple and orange should be our main colours (for luxury / royalty and warmth).

Using displays as lamps

Without the Aperture lights, you can use a phone or tablet at full brightness with any chosen colour on the screen. It's quite a handy technique to experiment with light!

I imagine the hero shot of the perfect hot chocolate on a black background, lit from each side in purple and orange.

In the reflection, you can see my phone and iPad acting as mini lights. The purple is on the app Procreate and the orange on an LED phone "torch" app.

Blender Experiments

Blender can be a powerful tool in recreating a set and lighitng it with physical, ray-traced lamps. You can use it to create a visual representation of your ideal lighting.

An experiment made in Blender, showing an box of sugar lit in purple lighting. One lamp for global illumination, one spotlight on the box and a point lamp inside to illuminate the top shelf.

To recreate this, I might tape an Aperture mini lamp to the top, set to purple in RGB mode. Or fit my cupboard with some purple card or cloth, and light from the top in white. The outside of the cupboards will be lit from either an Aperture or a small desk lamp in the room.

THE SET DRESSING

As shown in on the location page, we have a variety of purple items in the kitchen we can use as props. I would like some purple to feature in every shot. The stalls need a good dust and clean before use!

We can dress the table / island in a black table cloth. The interior of cupboards or background of shots can be lined in purple card. (These have been ordered from Amazon and should hopefully arrive before shoot day - tomorrow)