Saturday, 15 March 2014

Recreating Lighting in Memento


For the lighting exercise project we had to recreate the first three black and white scenes from either 'The Godfather' or 'Memento.' Our group decided to do it on 'Memento' as the scenes are more interesting and one of our friends decided to help us act in the film and also let us use his bedroom as the set, which was the closest we could get to looking like the motel room in 'Memento.'

My main role for the exercise was lighting and I used 2 redhead lights and a dedolight lighting kit, as this was a lighting exercise we wanted to make sure we got the lighting as close as possible to match the scenes in 'Memento.' This was my first time working on location lighting and I really enjoyed working with these lights even though it was a small room, so it was difficult to work with trying to find space to put the lights.

The scenes that we had to recreate were your typical film noir type of scenes as the scenes were dark dramatic and also filmed in black and white to show us the contrast between the story. The black and white sequences proceed in chronological order where as the colour sequences proceed in reverse chronological order.


"Film noir is a term introduced in the 1940s by French critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier. The French word "noir" translates to "black" or "dark," and film noir describes a style of filmmaking rather than an actual film genre." (Crawford 2012)


The only problems we encountered was the amount of daylight that was coming in from outside made the room too bright and to fix that we had to get towels and blankets to try and block out as much light as we possibly could. There was also a problem with the lens as the zoom was very shaky but next time when we are out on a shoot again, I would make sure that the weather is suitable for the filming and again I check all the equipment before we go ahead and shoot.





Crawford, S. (2012, February 28). "5 Film Noir Photography Tips. Retrieved March 15, 2014, from HowStuffWorks.com: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cameras-photography/tips/5-film-noir-photography-tips.htm

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