DHVPH - Lighting

Technical

We shot DHVPH on an old DSLR (Canon 70d) and really pushed that poor little sensor as far as it could go. The shoot was generally fairly low light, which is far from ideal, and we found that if we pushed the ISO beyond 400 the noise was unacceptable, so, we got our fasteest lense, a 2.8, cranked down the shutter speed to 30 and really took our time lighting everything. The final render still has quite a bit of noise in some shots, but we decided to embrace this, out of necessity really, though we did end up reshooting an entire sequence after a disasterous experiment with the CLOG picture profile.

These images are photos, rather than grabs from the footage, so are generally brighter but they do demonstarate to a dregree the stages we went through when lighting a shot.

Thematic

We used gels (read cellophane) to colour our LED panels red and blue. Initially I think this was just because it looked cool but we very quickly started associating the competing themes in the piece with these colours, and the white emanating from the fridge. As the power dynamic shifted we bagan to play with light to subtly reinforce this changing landscape. For the final couch sequence we played with the idea of having them switch seats, but it as too obvious and Power Human would never have accepted it. So, we swapped the lighting to have him bathed in blue and Dog Human in red, reversing the original association. I’m not sure that this albeit not so subtle change is read consciously but feel it does contribute to a sense of a shift in the relationship between the characters.