Cinematographic affordances: creative approaches to lighting in moving image practice

ABSTRACT

The widespread adoption of digital technologies in the film industry has received a good deal of critical attention from practitioners and scholars alike, however, little specific consideration about changing lighting practices can be found among this discourse. Traditionally, the domain of a cinematographer, the control and orchestration of lighting have significant aesthetic connotations for moving image work, so it is surprising that this practice remains an under-explored area. This article draws upon autoethnographic notation from my cinematography work in conjunction with written practitioner perspectives on the subject to account for the changing landscape of lighting practices in the film industry. Taking inspiration from sociocultural psychology, I argue that creative lighting is a fundamentally situated and distributed process during which practitioners pursue affordances arising from their given production environment, technological facilities and cultural context. Three new concepts toward lighting practices arise from this analysis; organisation, correspondence and association which I suggest can offer further insight into the creative lighting work of practitioners in the film industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Lighting
• cinematography
• autoethnography
• practice-research
• filmmaking
• theory of affordances

Acknowledgements

Film directors Freya Billington, Rob Daglish and Harald Hutter were tremendously supportive, allowing me to explore these ideas during our collaborative work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alex Nevill is a cinematographer, filmmaker and PhD candidate at UWE Bristol. Alongside his film work, Alex teaches part time at Ravensbourne and is an associate editor of Screenworks, a peer-reviewed online publication of practice-research in screen media. Alex received first class honours for his undergraduate degree at the University of Gloucestershire in 2011 and then completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Scotland Screen Academy in 2014.

ORCID

Alexander Nevill http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2382-2053

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council 3d3 Centre for Doctoral Training. The production of Not Waving (2015) was funded through Creative England’s iShorts scheme, Life in Body (2015) was funded by Channel 4 Random Acts and Hôtel de la Comète(2017) was supported by Kafard Films.