From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography

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Making a silhouette

Making a silhouette

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography

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Making a silhouette

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- A silhouette is when we see the outline of a dark figure against a brighter background. Silhouettes often make for great cinema because they reduce the detail in a shot to its most basic components; a subject and its background. This makes shots iconic and memorable. Creating silhouettes is fairly simple in theory but it might take some planning on set. It requires an interesting relationship between lighting and camera settings. Essentially, the trick is to get a very bright background, and by that I mean a really, really, bright background, and then reduce the exposure in camera. So here we have our model, Bitsy. We flooded the red backdrop behind her with light. With a normal exposure the lights on the background are so bright that they actually create enough bounce to get on our subject. Now, this is an ugly image, but this is exactly where we want to start out. From here I close the aperture on my camera lens. This reduces the exposure. Where I get to the point that I'm…

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