Introduction to Film Noir - 7 different types of shadows

Lighting is very unique in production and beneficial. Lighting can help create many things in film and television. It can transform a dull scene into a vibrant scene. It can enhance an atmosphere, and help an audience be aware of how these characters are feeling deep down inside. Overall in order to create a good production and film piece you would need good and precise lighting.

Introduction to Film Noir

Film noir is known as one of Hollywood's natural artistic movements

Film noir is a film genre that was introduced in the early 1940s and 1950s

This genre was films that consisted of many mystery and crime screenplays. These types of films were produced and filmed in black and white. Relating to its name ''Film Noir'' which means film black or black film. Film noir is produced with low key lighting, a style called chiaroscuro.

Chiaroscuro highlighted shadows as well with harsh lighting to form a sense of depth and volume in paintings, which resulted in Cinematographers that produced noir films to do the same to enhance and improve their work.

(Some of the film covers for this type of genre)

Most of these films included a very attractive starring woman, detectives and also superheroes. Most of these films had women that were ''femme fatales'' women that were very seductive, that knew how to manipulative and toy with the feelings of men.

Film Noir, focused really on the negative and dark side of life.

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Production & Lighting set up in Film Noir

In film noir the most leading lights are going to be powerful key lights and back lights. Fill lights are not really that significant as people want to exaggerate the contrast and create that low key appearance.

When approaching the film noir technique most people normally use hard lights as these types of lights create a shadow. The hardness/ softness of a light is the shadow that it forms. Hard lights are very significant and create the film noir look, as it helps form silhouettes and dark shadows. Soft lights leave blurry shadows and light shadows which is why it used more commonly on females to enhance their beauty, to make them look soft and gentle.

Shadows are very much apart of film noir and they're really important, You may think that its all lighting that is used to help form these shadows, but people also tend to use gadgets and tools to get shadows too.

We have the :

Cucocolis - (Cookies)

(You would place the cucoloris on a stand)

The most common used tool that people use in production to form shadows is the cucoloris aka the cookies. Cookies are cutouts of different types of materials that can expose a patterned shadow. These cutouts can be in various types of materials such as metal, plastic, wood and many more materials. The cucoloris will normally stand between the light and the person / subject.

GOBOS - STANDS FOR GO BEFORE OPTICS

Gobos and Cookies are very alike, but Gobos are slightly different as they're cut outs from glass or metal that are placed into a light between a light source and a lens. Gobos are good for producing clean cut shadows.

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One type of lighting that gets regularly used and feature in film noir is eye light. In film noir its very common for their to be a reflection in the actress/actors eye. Eye lights help to enhance the look of actress/actor, focusing on the eyebrows to get an eye-catching and dramatic look

In order to achieve eye light, you can use two different types of tools

FLAGS

Flags are a solid piece of material, that block any light that is present except for your eye-light.

BARNS DOORS

You could also use barn doors. Barn doors are basically leaves that are placed upon your light fixture which become mini flags that help block out the light.