From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography

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Changing the tone with gels

Changing the tone with gels

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography

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Changing the tone with gels

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- As I mentioned in the last movie, I'm happy with this as is, but want to show you just how much you could radically change the look of a scene with some simple cinematography tricks. Let's say we wanted to turn this boring, white-walled room into a party scene. By simply adding some colored gels to our lights, we can completely change the tone and mood of our scene. I first started by putting a pink gel on the hair light and a blue gel on the key light. I had a tough time getting really saturated and stylized colors using gels alone. I tried stacking the gels, which helped, but I never really got the look I was going for. You could also use flood lights or colored bulbs for this. In a stop-motion short film I did a few years ago, I used colored flood lights and it was much easier to get really rich color out of it. But I didn't have any handy for this shoot with Lucy. I did like how the pink gels took some of the exposure out of the hair lights in this case. If we had thicker gels…

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