Lighting in "The Hope of It All"

    My group and I didn't necessarily focus on the use of lighting in this project, meaning that we didn't use it to specifically represent or highlight anything in the video. Now thinking about this in hindsight, using lighting to our advantage probably would've made the film opening even better, but wasn't something we thought was too important nor possible to do during the filming of this. But, there are different shots with lighting that do relate to our story in some way or another, which the audience (and our group) could interpret to mean something more. So, actually, I think we did use lighting in this project, even though not all of it was on purpose.

    For example, in Betty's bedroom scene, the lighting is much different from that of the rest of the film opening. It is much darker than the outside scenes for sure and quite frankly it kind of goes with the melodramatic, heartbroken mood we were going for, even matching the emotional piano music that plays in the background. I think that the blinds being closed, which no doubt added to the dark lighting, helps to represent the same wretched feeling that she feels about the whole James situation. We didn't really discuss it with Tori prior to editing this, but I do believe that she made this scene appear darker on purpose, because although this was supposed to take place in the early-ish morning, a bright, sunny room would not have made much sense to have here.

    In the later scenes, the scene where Betty opens the door for James, for instance, the lighting gets much brighter, perhaps representing James as a light in Betty's life as he always was in her eyes (before he betrayed her of course). For the remainder of the film opening, the lighting is very bright because of the natural sunlight that was shining on us that day. This, although obviously not intentional, was great for us since we were going to film that last shot, of the camera tilting up to the sky, that same day. The scene preceding this tilt, of August and James arguing, may not have exactly fit the mood of the nice, sunny sky, but it was important that it was bright and not-cloudy because all along our plan was to use the blue sky as a backdrop to present our title on, and I think it turned out fine!

    We did not, and do not plan to, edit the lighting in post-production, and that is because 1. Melanie is not an expert at editing yet so she (and we) don't really want to mess it up too much and because 2. we all think that the lighting, how it appears in the current draft of this, is fairly good and doesn't really need any sprucing up.