The warmer the better!

      HELLO EVERYONE! THERE IS SO MUCH TO TALK ABOUT! This weekend was rather hectic for Daniel and I. We spent both Saturday and Sunday on the creation of our film intro.

    Saturday was dedicated to getting the set ready as well as testing camera settings. There were SO MANY discoveries and mishaps which we made throughout this process. We started off by creating the claymation set which we would place the doll in, and which we would get many shots of Jasmin playing and tweaking with. My room quickly became a makeshift art studio- we had paint thrown in one area, clay in another, clothes, cardboard boxes, tiny figurines, and cellophane paper strewn about everywhere. Daniel would be working on one aspect of the room (such as our doll's clay bed) while I worked on another (painting, then blow drying the doll's dresser). 

     After finishing the makeshift doll-house set, we went about transforming my room into Jasmin's. We brainstormed and worked tirelessly in order to make my room into the cave of a bohemian-indie-quirky-nerdy-teen filmmaker. We added posters, blankets, strategically-thrown yellow clothing, and other minute details such as hangers, pens and pencils, water bottles, half eaten food bowls and backpacks in order to achieve the aesthetic we wanted for her room. 

    THEN CAME THE LIGHTS! Now this was a struggle. Everything else before was child's play compared to us having to figure out how the lighting scheme would work, what color cellophane paper we would use, and what setting to use/manipulate on my DSLR. We kept the central lightning of my room's fan but covered it with pink and yellow cellophane paper in order to create a warm room tone, and also covered my desk lamp with the same colors for the same effect. We added a clip-on light to my closet in order to be the main light shining on Jasmin's right side and covered it with only pink cellophane paper (the warmer the better right?). We also added white string lights on my back wall, mainly because string lights look incredibly pretty and give off the "hipster" aesthetic. After we were situated with our lighting, we moved on to figuring out what exactly we were going to do with our DSLR. This is where the bulk of our frustration with the lights came in. We looked up articles about f-stop, shutter speed, and ISO and figured out which settings would be best for us- and then we had to figure out how to access those settings, which lead to ANOTHER round of looking up articles. Daniel then came up with a fantastic idea... we could trick the camera.

    Now hear me out, it makes sense! He said we could work with the white-balance setting to trick the camera into thinking that white was blue- which would then give the film an orange tone. After multiple tries with multiple different colors and objects (once we took a picture of blue cellophane paper reflected onto a piece of purple paper) we decided to use the blue of my wall in order to white-balance the camera. After that, the camera created a beautiful orange filter. I was amazed that we could create that filter just through manipulation of the DSLR and not in post production- it looks so much more natural. We kept these settings for our shoot the next day, which I'll talk more about in my next post!

Until next post,

Nicole Abuid


Mansurov, N. Understanding ISO, Shutter Speed and Aperture - A Beginner's Guide. Retrieved from https://photographylife.com/iso-shutter-speed-and-aperture-for-beginners/

Manipulating White Balance for Artistic Effect. (2009, March 02). Retrieved from https://digital-photography-school.com/manipulating-white-balance-for-artistic-effect/