we had a mini group tutorial with gavin to discuss the process of our group project with our ideas. We showed him the screen stills from the blue velvet scene that we wanted to re-create, and he gave us loads of good advice about the lighting and how to achieve a similar vibe to the film. We were slightly set on making in work in the cute vibesy pub, however, he proved it would be easy to do the shoot in the studio. This would also mean that we would have a lot more time to concentrate on the lighting of the shoot, therefore learning more about the external lighting aspects of photography
we practiced in this shoot with location lights, so we still had the possibility of shooting at the pub. We had to get out two lighting sets, two lights to light the curtain red, making it more prominent. One to create the blue musk coming from the back right, and another to have at the front being the spotlight. Gavin recommended using a smoke machine to create the blue haze
the brightest light is directly in front (hard light) of the singer, to the right, with a snoot on it to concentrate the spotlight. We had a blue gel back light, above to the left, facing the singer from behind. This would also have to hit the musicians in the background, casting a blue haze over them as well. At first we used honeycomb cover on the blue light, but we later removed this which helped make the blue more prominent. We had two red gel lights on the back curtains to turn them from grey to red. We used barn doors to add the gels and to separate the lights, to stop them hitting any other part of the frame. We also used large reflectors to separate and reflect the light as well into the right places of the image. We used these large reflector blocks for the red background lights
we eventually got there after a day at uni practicing and changing things around. This was a very successful and motivating day as we re-created the image a lot more effectively than we were able to do on the first test shoot. This has shown us that our idea is definitely achievable and possible. We are going to plan another test shoot to perfect our lighting techniques before we conduct our final shoot with models
