Throughout this series of film, we are looking at how stories are told through the various components. Remember that we are building up our knowledge of storytelling.

Moving from just camera techniques to the other components, we are considering the composition of the image – which incorporates lighting to draw focus, and framing, which is a camera decision.

The first motion pictures were lit by the most powerful light source in the solar system—the sun. Not only were many of these movies set outdoors, but even interior sets, too, were constructed in the open air simply so that there would be strong enough lighting to register images clearly on film. The development of more light-sensitive film stocks, together with more powerful electric lights, enabled filmmakers to be much less dependent on direct sunlight as their chief source of illumination.

The most basic lighting setup is known as three-point lighting, which consists of a key light, a fill light, and a backlight. The key light (A) aims directly at the subject—most likely the main character or object in the shot—and is the brightest light source for the shot. The fill light (B) is a softer light, and is usually placed opposite the key light; the fill light cuts down on shadows created by the bright key light. And the backlight (C) shines behind the subject or object, separating him, her, or it from the background—in other words, enhancing the sense of depth in the shot. Backlighting sometimes creates a halo effect around a character’s head, particularly at the edges of the hair.

The term key light is the source of two commonly used adjectives: low key and high key. To call something high key is to say that it’s intense, whereas low key means subdued. The overly cheerful atmosphere of a television game show would be described as high key, whereas the smoky mood of a jazz club would be called low key. These expressions come from cinematography. When cinematographers, also known as directors of photography (DPs) use a high proportion of fill light to key light, it’s called high-key lighting; the effect is both brighter and more even than when they use a low proportion of fill light to key light, which is called low-key lighting. The lower key the light, the more shadowy the effect. The distorting, spooky nature of extremely low-key lighting is perfectly illustrated by a trick almost every child has played: in the dark, you shine a flashlight up at your face from below your chin. That flashlight was your key light, and since there was no fill light at all, the proportion of fill to key was as low as you could get.

To hammer the point home: the object is not to determine where the key light was on the set, or
what the real proportion of fill light to key light was, or whether there was some top lighting (lighting from overhead). Instead, your goals are to notice the effects of the lighting in a given scene, to describe these effects accurately, and to venture analytically some ideas about what the effects mean.

Here is a great video that will assist with this.

Lighting and sound are things that are used in the production (the shooting) and the post-production (the editing) phases of the film making process.

On set lighting will be used through three major positions

• Key lighting – the lighting that happens in front of the actor, or the thing being brought to the front through lighting
• Fill lighting – the lights that sit over to the side and fill in the shadows created by the key light.
• Back lighting – the lights that are placed behind the character or the thing in focus again to help with framing the central image.

However, that is just the scraping of the surface when it comes to the vast range of tones and atmospheres that can be created by lighting.

Colours, levels of light, natural vs artificial, day vs night all have an impact on the lighting that is to be used, and they can all be examined through the mise en scene and the framing of a film shot, scene, or sequence.

Film lighting is a massive subject, it is one that we could easily spend months on in order to discuss the nuances of the styles and so forth.

Watch this short video from Studio Binder about the way that lighting works.

And here is part 2

You can read more about the process of lighting here. There is also a ‘cheat sheet’ here which may be helpful for those who wish to go further into their knowledge of lighting.

Sound

Sound has always existed in film – in some form or another.

We call them silent movies, those early films that did not have a soundtrack. But they weren’t actually silent. Most motion pictures of that era were screened with some form of live music. In large, urban theaters, exhibitors would often hire a full orchestra to accompany the movies they showed, while in small venues there would simply be a pianist. Organs, too, were commonly used to accompany films in those years. Not only could a single pipe organ or electric organ simulate a variety of instruments from clarinets to violins, but it could also provide a variety of sound effect such as bells and knocks.

It cannot even be said that silent films lacked spoken dialogue. Characters spoke to each other all
the time. But instead of hearing their words, audiences read them onscreen in the form of TITLE
CARDS—some of those words, anyway, since not every line of dialogue was printed in full. Title cards also conveyed information about characters, when and where scenes were set, and so on.

It wasn’t until 1927, when Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, that the world had the first feature film with synchronized dialogue and songs. Starring the popular song-and-dance man Al Jolson, it’s the story of a young Orthodox Jew who defies his father by becoming a jazz singer instead of a cantor (a vocalist who sings prayers during Jewish services). Jakie Rabinowitz leaves home, Americanizes his name to Jack Robin, and turns up ten years later at a cabaret, where he sings a synchronized song and then addresses not only the audience onscreen but the movie audience as well: “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” The Jazz Singer was a successful moneymaker for Warner Bros., and although it took several more years for synchronized sound to become standard in world cinema, the film effectively signaled the end of the so-called silent era and the beginning of feature-length TALKIES, an era that continues today.

The process of creating, manipulating, and playing back cinematic sound is typically long, expensive, and increasingly complex from a technical and personnel standpoint, and since the specific technologies involved in filmmaking are, here as elsewhere, less important to film studies than the meanings generated by the finished films, there is no point in an introductory class to overwhelm you with technical details. Still, you should be aware of the enormous amount of time, effort, and skill that go into every feature film soundtrack you hear.

This TED talk is a brilliant example of how sound can be used to create narrative development.

Sound is vital in film and, if it is done correctly, then you are likely to not even notice it!  It is a story telling technique that creates a soundscape, which is the whole array of sound, to have the narrative rise and fall.

The three main categories of film sound are dialogue, music, and sound effects.

Dialogue includes all the spoken words in a film. Dictionaries define the word dialogue as a conversation between two people (as opposed to monologue—a speech, usually long, by one person). But in film terminology, dialogue refers to any spoken words, including conversations, monologues, random words audible in crowd scenes, and voiceover narration.

The term music is self-explanatory, but it is important to remember that in film, music may be diegetic or nondiegetic; it may be sourced within the world of the story (we see someone with an iPod and earphones onscreen and we hear the music she is hearing) or not (we hear music playing as a bear walks alone through the woods).

Sound effects are all other noises, including both diegetic and nondiegetic sounds. The crash of ocean waves, birds chirping, a cannon’s boom, comical honking sounds—every noise that isn’t spoken words or music is considered a sound effect, whether it’s diegetic or not.

One key distinction to make among types of film sound is whether it is SYNCHRONOUS or NONSYNCHRONOUS. Synchronous means occurring at the same time, which in cinematic sound terms means that a sound is heard at the same instant as its source appears on the screen. We see a woman’s lips move, and we hear the matching words. A visitor presses a doorbell, and we hear the bell. A high school kid turns on a car radio, and music begins to play. These sounds and images are temporally and spatially matched: synchronous sound.

Not all sounds are synchronous. Nonsynchronous sounds, in contrast, are sounds that occur at a different time and/or in a different space than what appears onscreen. Directors and editors often use nonsynchronous sounds to make cuts from scene to scene smoother, less jarring. These are called SOUND BRIDGES. For instance, at the tail end of one scene, a man is being handcuffed and led away in long shot. Anticipating the next scene, the sound of a cell door clanking shut is heard on the soundtrack for a second or two before the director cuts to a full shot of the man, now a prisoner, in his cell. For the last few seconds of the earlier scene, the clanking sound is nonsynchronous with the image; once the next scene begins, the sounds of the cell become synchronous. Some nonsynchronous sounds are mismatched with the image, either by intention or by technological failure. When a film print becomes worn, for instance, or has been poorly printed to begin with, characters’ speech may slip out of synch. Film dialogue that has been dubbed into another language is also nonsynchronous—characters’ lips move to form words that are obviously different than those heard on the soundtrack.

A related term is ASYNCHRONOUS SOUND. Whereas the prefix non- means not, the prefix a- means without. Asynchronous sound, therefore, refers to those sounds that are heard without their sources being seen onscreen; the term asynchronous sound means the same thing as the term OFFSCREEN SOUND. For example, a shot of an office located in a large city may be accompanied by faint traffic noises. The cars and buses that are presumably producing the sounds aren’t visible onscreen—the shot is of an interior, and there may not even be a visible window—but the offscreen sounds are understood to be occurring simultaneously with the visible action.

The term offscreen sound leads to yet another: AMBIENT SOUND—the background noises of the scene’s environment. Very few places on Earth are perfectly silent. Car motors run and leaves rustle; pipes rumble and air conditioners hum. When film conversations are shot and recorded, edited, and screened without accompanying ambient sounds, they sound like they are taking place in a weirdly muffled or even totally soundproofed room. Listen to the room in which you are sitting, and hear the particular ambient sounds of that particular space. Noises like the ones you are now hearing are generally recorded separately from the dialogue and added later during mixing. Even in the absence of car horns and alarms, barking dogs in the distance, and the like, every room has what is called ROOM TONE, which is also recorded apart from the dialogue and inserted into conversations to fill any gaps that may otherwise occur.

As you may already know, another way of distinguishing cinematic sounds is to categorise them on the basis of whether they are DIEGETIC or NONDIEGETIC—in other words, whether the sounds are sourced in the world of the story or not. Almost all film dialogue is diegetic: characters speaking, whether synchronously, nonsynchronously, or asynchronously, usually do so within the world of the story. For a funny exception to this general rule, see the beginning of the comedy The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), directed by Frank Tashlin. The star of the film, Tom Ewell, appears onscreen, looks toward the camera, and directly addresses the audience: “Ladies and gentlemen, the motion picture you are about to see is a story of music. I play the role of Tom Miller, an agent . . .” Ewell’s dialogue refers to the story but remains outside of it; it is, therefore nondiegetic dialogue.

A key misconception of sound is that filming and sound recording is all done together at the same time. It is not. The camera records the images only. The sound is actually a completely different system, and much of the sound magic happens behind the scenes in post production.

Here is a short video about this

Like lighting, sound is something that is highly influential to your understanding of the film. And Foley sound makers are a major contributor to this story telling technique.

And then there is orchestral or musical aspects that are included within the film. In this short film on leitmotif you can begin to see the patterns used by cinema storytellers that help with the way the characters, setting, and themes are developed.