Lighting: HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL
As film students, we can immediately tell just by looking at a frame of a film whether it is a student film, TV movie or a high-budget film. But why? Besides casting, costume and production design, and color grading, lighting is probably the main indicator of film quality (quality in terms of budget).
It’s ironic because when I talk about lighting being an indicator of quality, I really mean shadow (mainly the level of fill). Characters being evenly lit with high fill is an indicator of low-budget films because the scene is shot from multiple cameras to save time (and therefore money on a small budget).
For our examples, we’re going to be looking at two movies in the High School Musical trilogy. Wait, what?? Well, the first movie was shot for and released for television while the third movie was shot and released for theaters with a much larger budget (almost 3 times as much). This makes it a great example of lighting improvement for us to study.
The lighting concept that is most important to know before we jump into our analysis is “modeling”. Modeling is using both light and shadow to show form/structure of the subject. Essentially, it’s having high contrast between shadow fill and key. I found photos of Jessie Ware to break this down:
I desaturated all of the images so that we can just focus on color value. Notice how on the right, the modeled lighting brings more character in her bone structure and feels like a higher-quality image. You must have contrast between light and shadow to show pleasing form of subjects. This is the same lesson that could be applied to High School Musical in terms of how light modeling made their third film feel like a bigger production.
So, lets examine shots from the first movie (on the left) and the third (on the right) and look at how light and shadow showing form (modeling) and isolating subjects (spotlighting) makes a difference in perceived quality of a film still:
The first example is of Troy in homeroom. Close-ups in the third movie usually follow classic, 3-point lighting (even though it doesn’t make physical sense, it helps model the character and separate them from the background). In the image on the right, notice the bright key compared to the much darker fill on Troy. This emphasizes the “sun” outdoors as the motivating light rather than the house lights within the room. The house lights serve as the even, top lighting in the image on the left which is much too flat.
The gym comparison is one of my favorite examples of lighting from the ground-up: meaning lighting from darkness and turning on one light at a time. In the image on the right, the light falls-off to only spotlight what is important to see in this scene.
Now for the coach close-up. The image on the left feels as if it’s lit with a key as well as house lights, giving it a flat, unpleasing look. But the image on the right has 3-point lighting with more contrast between light and shadow, and his dark suit also helps him stand out more over his background.
Where the image on the right really excels is in chiaroscuro. It lights the crowd unevenly in pools of light contrasted with shadow. Also, the contrast of warm lighting on the crowd juxtaposed with the blue-lit structure truly increases the production value. Lastly, depth is added to the image on the right with bright lights against the wall placed in the farthest point from the camera (more on that in John Alton’s Painting with Light).
Last is the Gabriella bedroom scene in each movie. Night is best represented through high key/fill contrast. The image on the right has a stronger rim to represent the moon with little fill hitting the characters from the camera’s direction which better sells the feeling of night. It also has less fill on the tree in the background to emphasize night even more.
That concludes this study, but there are so many more examples to break down including the first two Spider-Man movies:
