This top ten list encompasses works where the filmmaker’s best utilized lighting from all these challenges either from budgetary restraints, contempt for Hollywood, skillful laziness and of course, to compliment the film’s overall aesthetic. Some of the most accomplished films on this list had sizable budgets, but the filmmakers decided against using electric lighting in order to enhance the atmosphere of their pieces. With so much money to inflate and anti-Hollywood notions to stir, it’s easy to overlook that some filmmakers may simply enjoy the aesthetic and challenge of shooting only with available and natural light. A quality that all these films share is their use of utilising only available and natural lighting and being shot entirely on location. Morgan Spurlock, 2002) and “Paranormal Activity” (dir. Since then, the celebrated accolade has been passed to “Super-Size Me” (dir. Eduardo Sánchez & Daniel Myrick, 1999) reportedly cost only $25,000 after principal photography, and went on to generate almost $250 million worldwide, enjoying the largest cost-to-profit ratio since “Mad Max” (dir. When a low budget, independent film succeeds on an international scale, it can propel unprecedented wealth unto its creators. Disenchanted by their ever-dominant American counterparts, the directors of these genres produced films that purposefully went against the grain of the studio-centric Hollywood system during the 1950s and 60s. In the past, European art cinema movements such as Italian neorealism and the French New Wave were reflectively characterized by their own country’s social and economic difficulties, filmed quickly and often on location. Often independent productions will opt for natural lighting because they’ll only have a small window of time that they’re able to shoot on location – or lack the paperwork to film there in the first place.
So if the filmmakers use available or natural lighting on their productions, there is considerable time and money to be saved.Īdditionally, as newer DSLR’s can shoot at over 40,000 ISO with others 4k ready out of the box – why even light a scene at all? Why spend thousands of dollars on Arri Fresnels, Blondies, Redheads, Dedos or Kino Flos if you can get away with a primitive LED tacked on top of a DSLR with its ISO heavily cranked? Aside from the obvious problems with that train of thought, low and no-budget filmmakers do have a tendency of thinking this way. They’re heavy, their bulbs explode and there’s always downtime waiting for them to cool before they can be packed away. And there is, alas… some merit for those reservations.īecause the more equipment a filmmaker carries the longer it takes to get to locations, and once a light’s in place it still requires an assemble of extras to function – from c-stands to gels, diffusion, extension cables, shot bags, gaffer tape, pegs and often power from a generator. There’s a skeptical notion in the world of filmmaking that affiliates the use of available or natural light as being cheap, the filmmakers lazy, or that the project was rushed – because the filmmakers were being cheap… and lazy.