Lights Film School Blog

How to Film a Documentary Interview

Interviewing a documentary subject can be challenging enough. Thinking about technical or editing opportunities while filmmaking can kill the creative spirit of the shoot. However, the technical elements of filming an interview are incredibly important if you want to create a high production look to your documentary. We’ll publish another blog post about how to light a documentary interview, but this blog post will tackle the subject of properly capturing enough “cutaway shots” for editing pu...

Music Video Deconstruction

Every now and again we deconstruct films, short and documentaries with our students. Today we’re going to deconstruct a widely popular Bjork YouTube video. The purpose of deconstructing films and music videos helps you identify three incredibly important things. 1. It exposes story structure 2. It exposes the technical attributes to the film / video 3. It exposes compositional elements to the film / video Today we have deconstructed the Bjork music video entitled “All is Full of Love”. I...

Cinematography: Color Simplicity

Cinematography is such an important part of the filmmaking process it’s a shock that more independent filmmakers don’t spend the necessary time to fully understanding the artistic and technical components of color that aid in the construction of breathtaking footage. Lights Film School recommends that our students read books on painting and photography to better understanding the expressionist period, the impressionist period, lines, shapes, composition, isolation and last but not least color an...