Lighting and Filters

Indie rock bands focus heavily on the lighting conditions and techniques in their music video. The purpose of using particular techniques is to convey a certain meaning, this could be something personal to the artist or it could affect a generation. This links to the Barthes semantic theory that the audience must uncover the true meaning of the lyrics. In the music video seen above "Firestarter" by Torre Florim the lighting is constantly low in the background focusing our attention to the well lit foreground. This demonstrates to the audience the music video focus is what is set directly in front of them. The fact that the background is darker then the foreground creates suspicion as we wonder the purpose of having low lighting. The main character Torre Florim is sat alone in a spotlight conveying his importance and the harsh lighting suggests that he is the "Firestarter". The intense lighting on the lead singer is done to easily show the emotion of the character. We can seen a stern look implying a serious figure matching the lyrics of the song. However, half of the characters face is covered in shadow to represent an alternative view to him, that he has a darker side to his personality. We can infer that through Barthes semiotic codes that the reason for the lead singer to be the "Firestarter" is because of the unnamed female in the video.




Matt and I may attempt to include filters when editing our music video to give it an alternative look. We could make the video seem darker by adding a filter to giver a grungier appearance. This is relevant to our location as we are shooting our music video in an abandoned theatre and we want to create a isolated atmosphere. The Hulme Hippodrome has very harsh lighting so Matt and I may have to create this neglected look. I do have prior experiance with editing the appearance of the recording as for AS one of the scenes did not match the rest s the lighting was extremely harsh. Therefore, I changed the contrast to make the clip fit in seamlessly. I will use this experience this year at A2 but i want to explore alternative ways of editing the filter and in order to do this I need to research methods and tutorials on Final Cut Pro X. Final Cut Pro X is the editing software that Matt and I will be using to edit our raw footage. It has an option to edit and filter the raw footage which we may use to alter the appearance.