Why is the time of day important in filming?
It is really important to consider the time of day that you film. Certain genres of film will be more dramatic and effective if they are filmed at a particular time of day. For example, horror films are often scarier if they are filmed in dim lighting or at night time. There are many examples of horrors that are filmed in the dark!
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why does darkness make films look more scary?
Darkness makes the film scarier and more tense for the audience because it limits vision. The audience can't see where the killer is hiding, whether he/she is about to jump out. When things aren't completely clear and rooms aren't brightly lit we are always in danger of tripping or falling too. Darkness makes the site of activity appear more vulnerable and harder to help. This makes horrors more intense and frightening.
what about the weather?
The weather is also important for horror films. Often horrors are shot in rainy/stormy weather. This helps to set a scary atmosphere for the scene. It can also help to give the the audience the impression that something is going to go wrong because the weather is bad. Using bad weather to set the scene can also make the audience feel more tense because it leads the audience to the conclusion that the characters are less accessible because of the difficult weather and therefore harder to help when they're in trouble. These ideas, along with the fact that bad weather makes scary noises, shows that weather should definitely be considered as well as the time of day when filming horror.
what about our horror O.t.s?
We have filmed some of our o.t.s in daylight and some at night time.
Our daylight scenes show our sight of activity walking round school being stalked. Our screencasts are obviously already bright. We decided to do some scenes in daylight because we feel it makes it more realistic and therefor surreal for the audience- people can be stalked and hunted in daylight and nobody knows! This causes the audience to feel paranoid and implies that it could happen to them too! To achieve this, we made sure we were filming in mid day kind of daylight and under bright lighting indoors.
However, we filmed our scenes in the stalker's bedroom in complete darkness with filming lamps. We did this because we wanted to completely blur out his face but also keep it dark in the room. This makes him unidentifiable and therefor more of a threat in the eyes of the audience. This technique implies that the stalker is a dark, frightening, evil person. We felt that showing our stalker under bright lights, exposing his face would be confusing and would have mis-lead the audience into being under the impression that the stalker wasn't a threat to our site of activity. We felt that lighting him up from above with ceiling lights would expose all of his facial features and would make him look almost angelic, which is obviously the opposite image from what we're hoping to create! We wanted to exaggerate just how twisted the stalker's obsession is and just how frightening the stalker is. To achieve this, we didn't use filming lamps and waited until the evening to film (it was December!)
In the scene where the lights are turned off on the sight of activity (obviously increasing the tension in the scene because it's harder to defend yourself from danger in the dark) we started the scene by using a lamp and a ceiling light. The ceiling light was providing the biggest amount of light so this was the one we turned off for dramatic effects. We kept a filming lamp on throughout because without any light at all the action in the scenes wasn't as clear because the room didn't have much natural light in to start with.
Our daylight scenes show our sight of activity walking round school being stalked. Our screencasts are obviously already bright. We decided to do some scenes in daylight because we feel it makes it more realistic and therefor surreal for the audience- people can be stalked and hunted in daylight and nobody knows! This causes the audience to feel paranoid and implies that it could happen to them too! To achieve this, we made sure we were filming in mid day kind of daylight and under bright lighting indoors.
However, we filmed our scenes in the stalker's bedroom in complete darkness with filming lamps. We did this because we wanted to completely blur out his face but also keep it dark in the room. This makes him unidentifiable and therefor more of a threat in the eyes of the audience. This technique implies that the stalker is a dark, frightening, evil person. We felt that showing our stalker under bright lights, exposing his face would be confusing and would have mis-lead the audience into being under the impression that the stalker wasn't a threat to our site of activity. We felt that lighting him up from above with ceiling lights would expose all of his facial features and would make him look almost angelic, which is obviously the opposite image from what we're hoping to create! We wanted to exaggerate just how twisted the stalker's obsession is and just how frightening the stalker is. To achieve this, we didn't use filming lamps and waited until the evening to film (it was December!)
In the scene where the lights are turned off on the sight of activity (obviously increasing the tension in the scene because it's harder to defend yourself from danger in the dark) we started the scene by using a lamp and a ceiling light. The ceiling light was providing the biggest amount of light so this was the one we turned off for dramatic effects. We kept a filming lamp on throughout because without any light at all the action in the scenes wasn't as clear because the room didn't have much natural light in to start with.