3-Point Lighting

Chris Mick, the former equipment manager for IFP Minnesota and Producer at 355 Productions explains how to put lighting into your short drama in order to achieve an effect and mood to match the story. Lighting can be one of the single biggest factors that will separate your film from amateur home movies.

Properly lighting using 3 lights can assure you are able to get clear and true skin tones, a well rounded depth surrounding your actors, separation between the focal plane and the background and foreground that directs the eye for dramatic impact. Lighting, if done properly, can immediately raise the production quality of your film and that's what you need to get recognized in this contest as well as for future projects you want to make as an indie or in Hollywood.

With home movies a videographer often relies on available light or a lighting scheme that uniformly lights everything exactly the same regardless of where you want to viewer to focus their attention. This undirected light scheme makes movies flat, boring and tiresome to watch.

The inability to design with light is immediately recognizable as amateur by judges and the general audience alike. If you find a professional lighting designer or have a camera operator who is aware of how to compose both with light as well as framing and object composition you'll be way ahead of all the rest in this storytelling challenge.

IFP Minnesota rents three-point light packages by the day or weekend at really low cost to local independent filmmakers. Also, if you can get a group of five people or more together, IFP will bring a trainer like Chris Mick in for a topical class on lighting, location sound, or camera framing and composition. These technical services can be an invaluable resource to not only this Screenlabs Challenge 2008 production but your future career in filmmaking.