Notes on lighting
It is essential in horror that you have the right lighting for the effect you are trying to achieve. Having the wrong type of lighting can completely ruin a shot and even make painful viewing for the audience. It is traditional in horror to have low-key lighting which sets a mysterious,ominous tone. The lighting effects everything the audience sees and how it is perceived. In darkness there is an uncertainty of what is exactly there. This creates anticipation for something bad to happen, which is exactly what creates a successful horror film- suspense and anticipation. In our opening title sequence we obviously wanted to create suspense by emphasising shadows and keeping the lighting low-key. The challenge with the lighting was that we still needed the audience to be able so see clearly what was going on. However we couldn't had to do this without the excessive use of electrical lighting as it would ruin the mood and feel unnatural. Therefore we decided to film in daylight and achieve the low-key lighting by use of effects in the editing stage. SR
The effect used to create the 'night-time' look of our opening title sequence was a mixture of two different effects, 'cool tones' and 'day into night'. These two effects were successful together, as they created a 'night time' effect, but all of the action within the shot was still easily visible. NE