Saturday, December 1, 2012
Entry 67
Friday I went to see the Clemson Player's production of Boom. A comedy about the end of the world. It was a really funny experience and the play was quite inventive. The play took place in a single room with multiple artificial lights and the character's were constantly using them. So there were several scenes where a character had to turn on a light, or scenes where the room was plunged into darkness due to a power failure and the characters had to use flashlights. While the light in the scenes were quite realistic I noticed that several scenes had more light than a truly realistic scene would. For example, after the blackout an emergency generator was used to power some hanging lights, and after a couple of minutes several other lights were gradually added to enhance the visibility.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Entry 66
Snapshots of Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain
image taken from: http://mithrasblog.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/the-fountain/
Darren Aronofsky is an truly visual storyteller and director. Each of his films has a stunning and well developed look and feel. The film of his that I found the most aesthetically pleasing was The Fountain. A story of life. love, loss, and rebirth, The Fountain is nothing if not beautiful and each moment in the movie is filled with this golden unearthly light. In some scenes, such as the astronauts journey through the stars, this light is purely abstract and symbolic. The scene is meant to be dreamlike and almost surreal so the light while beautiful isn't something we would ever really get a chance to experience. However, this golden glow appears in more realistic scenes as well such as in the second picture where a scientist and his wife visit a museum. The light scheme reflects the principles of magical realism, an artistic movement bent on revealing the magical beauty in the mundane and ordinary. The lights in this scene have the same golden unearthly vibe as the lights in the top picture, but they're grounded far more in reality. These simple museum lights have been enhanced to really stress just how heavenly the love between these two people is and just how special the bond they share has become.
Entry 65
Snapshot of Disney's The Lion King, Broadway Musical
When I was young a group of friends and I went to see this musical in Boston. I remember being blown away by the costumes but looking back at the production there is a great deal of beautiful lighting in the musical as well. I brought up this picture because I was struck at how the lighting designer chose to handle the task of lighting the actors with these elaborate masks. In order to make such the audience focuses on the animal masks and sees those as the heads of the characters and not the actors' faces, the designers chose to aim these bright spotlights onto the masks and leave the rest of the actors' faces and bodies to be revealed by the fill-lights. It was a simple thing but it makes a huge impact.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Entry 64
Jillian Mayer's Scenic Jogging
Go Here for Video:
Scenic Jogging by Jillian Mayer is a video which features a lone woman running down the empty sidewalk of an urban street at night with a projection of a green field shown on the buildings behind her. Its quite an interesting sight to see this woman run down the streetlight lit road and see the difference in lighting when the projection has a wall or hard surface to hit and when an empty lot or street intersection denies the projection a surface. I wonder if you could have a play where an image was being projected but there was no surface for the projection to appear on and then during the climax a wall appeared and the projection became visible.
Entry 63
I was walking down a street with several buildings and noticed that the lights from each building, and the lights from the cars and lamps, and the light from the sunset all seemed to exist in a certain area of space. In a similar sense that I could break down each object into a certain shape or color there was a certain type of light unique to each object. I think in my mind I expected these lights to mix or be overpowered by one major light source. While there was no definite edge to the objects light they still had a certain degree of separation from them. I bet in the same way some artist use only color or shapes to create an environment an artist could use different types of light.
Entry 62
image taken from: http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/GlennLigon/Images
This next picture is to examine the use of positive and negative space in light. Human's will always perceive darker colors as being behind or farther away from lighter colors.This picture Hands is a perfect example of this the only indications of depth present are the use of light in shadow, and of overlapping. The sizes of the hands don't vary that much so size isn't really an indicator. Light is used to reveal depth here by creating a background of darkness and a foreground of white lit hands. Oddly enough the degree of light an object receives is not related to how close of far away from us. the closest hands have varying degrees of light and the small faraway hands are both brightly lit and covered in shadow. Still the presence of the light allows use to see the details of the hands and to help with our perception of depth this means that closer objects have more details and objects that are further away have less.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Entry 61
image taken from: http://lsimpsonstudio.com/photographicworks07.html
Lorna Simpson's Necklines is a great example of how to use contrast to reveal the subtle contours and curves of the human body. The light raps around the figure revealing peaks and casting even the smallest crevice into shadow. You can clearly see the slope of the neck and the dimples created by the collar bone. I especially love the middle image which beautifully exposes lips of the figure using the light to pull them away from the chin. The extra touch of the white shirt to contrast the dark background is also quite inspiring.
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