Shooting Day 1: Internal Lighting Issues

    When planning how we'd be shooting inside it was my intention to have the characters be lit by the light of the TV. I wanted to do this specifically because seeing the changing brightness/color of the TV and hearing the audio from it shows that the characters watching TV is diegetic. 

    However, using the TV was an extremely unpredictable and unreliable light source. When beginning to film and turning the TV on it would randomly go black, and even when it wasn't black, it often wasn't bright enough. This dim lighting made it difficult - and even impossible at times - for the camera to see the actors when we'd record. This is demonstrated in the clip below:

    In order to compensate for this poor and unreliable lighting I mirrored my phone to the TV to show a white screen. Though this constant color/brightness of light would not create the same effect as watching TV as we'd originally intended, it provided a far more reliable light source than before. Even though we had to reshoot a handful of times in order to get lines/acting right, flaky lighting was no longer the issue.

The two photos above show two identical shots when using different lighting sources, demonstrating how much of a difference it made in what could be seen. (L) Lighting the scene using random shows on the TV. (R) Lighting the scene by mirroring a completely white video onto the TV. Though the shot on the right using the all-white TV light is still a bit grainy, it's still significantly easier to see the subjects of the shot. This change made a night-and-day difference.