Light Painting
What Is Light Painting ?
In the second/third week of experimental animation, we were introduced to light painting and how it is used in films, animated and live action. Light painting is an photography technique that uses a moving light source while taking a long-exposure photograph. A scene or object can be brought to life by painting with a beam of light!
One of the films we looked at that uses light was Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988's Japanese animated film 'Akira'. Akira is a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk action film set in Tokyo in the future. The film uses a lot of light through out, when researching into the film I was able to find that Otomo considered Tokyo to be its own character in the film. The film's opening with a flickering light that helps set the tone for the movie, while the film’s neon palette saturates the film and helps to support the techno-corporate world that it portrays. Through out the film, light helps bring key point of the film to life: the city’s rebellious youth, as well as the power of the authorities. The gallery below shows some snapshot from the film when it's using lighting.
For the next part of this project, we were required to produce some light painting pieces, for my light painting I used Akira's neon lights as my source of inspiration. Particularly, on how it's used on the motorbikes, giving them a cyberpunk, busy atmosphere. Using my knowledge of cameras learnt from the first week, I was able to produce a variety of light paintings, as shown in the gallery below.
I used a range of lights to create different form or light: for the blue light paintings I used the lights of a wifi box, for the red light I used the back of a mouse, for the yellow lights I set up some LED lights in a rectangular shape this helped create multiple similar shapes. I really liked how the light paintings turned out, I'm glad that I was able to get a variety of paintings, if I was able to change anything I would perhaps have made some of the forms straighter.