lighting and colour - Miss Miller

Planning lighting and colour

The lighting and colour is essential to plan and ensure a range of different lighting and colour is included in order to portray the artists feelings and emotions. The lighting and colour helps the audience to understand how she is feeling, and what she is trying to say. For example low key lighting would show a sad mood and set the scene for the music video. In this planning we had to come up with five different lighting and colours, the five we choose were conventional to the soul genre: Low key lighting, Red lipstick, Black lighting, High-key lighting and Black & white filter. All of our five planned connote love, depression, down, heartbreak, fear and past. All of these connotations are stereotypical and conventional to the soul music genre. Overall the lighting and colour will effectively help the audience to understand and relate to the music genre. 

The first lighting and colour we planned to use was the Red lipstick. The colour red connotes: love, passion and desire. We are planning on using the red lipstick when Amy is performing on stage at the chorus part of the song. This is to emphasis to the audience that the artist still has hope in finding love and returning to her family. It also shows the artist as being talented which the audience respect and build up their likability for the artist. Amy is going to be in a black dress which connotes elegance and mysterious as she is trying to overcome her past, the red lipstick adds to the outfit in order to make the artist stand out and be memorable. Overall the red lipstick leads to the audience getting an understanding of how strong minded the artist is, because the audience know that her previous relationships have ended badly and she still has the confidence and will to carry on looking for love.

The second lighting and colour we planned was low key lighting, this is a very stereotypical of a soul genre music video as it sets a sad and vulnerable sort of mood straight away. We have planned to use the low key lighting through out the majority of the music video. The low key lighting helps the artist portray her thoughts, feelings and emotions. This helps the music video to become more relatable and effective in engaging the audience with the artists feelings. The low key lighting being used throughout the majority of the music video, shows that although the artist is in a lot of depression and sadness, she still carries on with her life. This represents the artist again as strong minded and a individual with a large amount of respect for herself. Overall the low key lighting represents the dark side of the artist and is used throughout, because the whole song is to do with wanting to escape her life and return to her home town.

The third light and colour we planned to use was back lighting, as a group we thought this would be effective in engaging the audience with how the artist is feeling and her insecurity. The backlighting is being used in order to create a silhouette effect when the artist is in the performance style of the music video on stage. This is used to highlight her shyness and insecurity which shows to the audience that she hiding her identity. By hiding her identity the audience can build up an understand that the artist is fairly cold blooded and pessimistic about life. This leads to the audience feeling sympathy and sorry for the artist, due to their lack of confidence.

We also plan to incorporate the use of a black and white filter in our music video. The filter is conventional as black and white can represents dark and light, past and future. We plan to use this filter when the artist is playing the piano. This is because black and white filter produces an effect of reflecting on her past. When playing the piano the artist is reminiscing her childhood memories and wishes she could escape her current lifestyle. The colours used black and white, show to the audience that the artist is vulnerable and innocent due to the black surrounding the white. The artist is shown through the white colour which means she is innocent but caught up in darkness, that is leading to the artist to be depressed and insecure about herself. This overall gives the audience a better understanding of the thoughts and feelings and the emotions the artist is going through.

Finally we are going to use high key lighting. The high key lighting helps to represents happiness and enjoyability which is unconventional to the soul genre, because the soul genre is usually mainly about sadness and depression. The high key lighting is used to show flash backs of when the artist was in her home town, and how they were happy memories. This we be when we film at a friends house and show the artist laughing and having fun with her friends. This lighting helps us to illustrate our narrative of the artist wanting to return to her hometown. Showing happy memories that the audience can understand that it is back in her hometown. Is important because the whole narrative is about the artist wanting to return to her hometown, because this is where she enjoys life and has a sociable and fun life.

In conclusion the lighting and colour will help the audience understand to and relate to the music video. The planning was very helpful because we came up with very good ideas as a group, I personally think that if we did not plan the lighting and colour we would not have thought about it at the time of filming. The black and white filter was a key aspect of planning as when we start to do our editing, we will now ensure that the filter is on, so that the audience can gain a better understanding as to what the narrative of the music video is about. Overall this planning task has been very effective in making sure we include a range of lightings and colours, in order to construct a enjoyable music video.