What movie(s) would you recommend for beginners learning lighting?

[shutterwill]

Recently I found out that there are quite a lot of lighting set ups in the movie Platoon.
I hope someone can give me more advice on moives that has a lot of lighting examples as well.
Thx

 

[Allen Ellis]

I watched the commentary for Serenity recently, and they talked a lot about the sophistication of the lighting used for that film.

 

[paulears]

The problem is that in almost all cases, you cannot determine exactly how things were done if the intention was realism. You can analyse shadows, edge quality and contrast and make educated guesses on where thing were and sometimes what they were - but I've never seen the actual set-ups detailed. I did see a behind the scenes mini-doc on Star Trek 2 - but the description in the commentary was really mangled and what was visible was not what they were talking about.

 

[Snapper123]

While the techniques of the film will mystify you to no end, I think that Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely is an amazingly beautiful film that in all ways sets itself apart from the commercial, sitcom style of things. One point of the film is this though; either the entire thing was made by extremely complex systems of beautiful lighting techniques, or the entire thing was made with nothing but a few reflectors and having a script that was written entirely for the conditions of the locations. The entire film has the exact same style from scene to scene, and was written, at least choreography wise, strictly to take advantage of the on-location scenes it was filmed in (a castle in the UK, the streets of Paris, the roads of South America.) Even half of the small and random characters in the film were randomly found in the areas the film took place in, much like a majority of Korine's stuff. And while I'm sure there could have very well been additional equipment that made each scene more special, each and every scene has the characters interacting with the majority of the light source; having dialogue in front of overexposed windows, walking through spots of shade and overexposure until the right spot is found to have a conversation, having only one lamp on with the rest of the room being jet black, the cinematography was extraordinary and if it wasn't a "natural" film, the entire thing sure makes you think it was. You even get to see many of the locations under different times of day, which is also really neat. There's just not a minute of that film that looks like a Shampoo commercial or teenage drama film, the majority of the what beats me is how they constantly made Marilyn's face so beautiful and soft, and I think that was for the majority, make-up techniques.

Thing is, to add to the naturalism to the film, the cinematographer, Marcel Zyskind, seems to be no stranger to scenes that either look beautiful naturally or look ugly at least trying to be, and writer and director Harmony Korine, well, his latest film Trash Humpers speaks for itself. He's no stranger to being completely anarchist against professionalism, both Trash Humpers and Julien Donkey-Boy were filmed Dogme 95 style, yet there's not one scene in anything he's done that you would complain about the cinematic vision of the scene at hand. He has always been a writer focused on blending his filming style with the common-sense techniques of using natural lighting sources, and he's worked with some of the most amazing DP's around to make that come true. I'm not saying that's exactly what he did for Mister Lonely, after all, the film is the complete opposite in a beautiful way than anything he's ever done, but it was at least written to blur the line between having a lit room out of nowhere, and opposedly having a lit room because the room naturally has cathedral sized windows. That's just the type of thing I appreciate as a writer, wether the effects are truly real or not. Biggest mystery is the fact that the entire film rarely uses cut-away shots, most of the scenes are filmed with one camera and that camera does not stop recording for minutes on end. There will be cameras, for instance, that travel through an entire room, street, field, or hallway without once cutting to another angle. There's really just alot of magic in the production, and while the story to the film itself is a little jaded, drunk, and watered down, it manages to end as good as it begins, with the middle being quite dull with not enough story to really justify the extremely shocking way it ends. But there's over 30-minutes of cut footage from the film I'd like to one day see and possibly try and put back together on my own. It's one of those films that would do wonders with a re-edit, a few extra scenes, and more music throughout. Editing (as putting the scenes together and adding music, not color editing.), sadly, is one process that Korine's films always fail on, even though his production values are always superb and hard-hitting, emotionally, and all of his imagery is truly see-it-to-believe-it. He's never used a CG effect in any of his films, nor green screen, nor anything else like that, and I think it's extremely inspirational in a time where I profoundly believe that filmmaking is a "my equipment dick is bigger than yours" or "look at me I can blow up things using my computer" career.

 

[Noel Evans]

Depending on the genre - I would also search out anything Chris Doyle and take a look. Light set ups are one thing - but you also need to know the intention of the style behind them.