 Action/Adventure: July 13, 2022 Issue [#11461] |
This week: Lighting Your Action Scenes Edited by: Jayne  
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Lighting a scene in scripts, plays, and films is important to the viewer’s experience, setting everything from mood to shifts in tone. The way a scene is lit is about more than making sure we can see what’s happening. It can hide things from us, emphasize key points, draw the eye, paint vibrant pictures, and even create confusion or chaos.
While lighting is an often unspoken but critical element to the success of a live scene, it is less often explored in literature. Not that lighting doesn’t exist in fiction writing, it’s more a tendency to take it for granted. A bright, sunshiny day can convey what the reader would typically construe as ‘full light’—everything is easy to see, well-lit, with few menacing shadowy corners.
Don’t forget, though—the sun does create shadows, and they can be quite sharp, long, or deep. If you’re looking for a shadowless type of light that still provides a fully lit area, you’re looking for soft light—not the sun beating down.
With action sequences, it’s important to remember to communicate the lighting element. Noir concepts, such as harsh lighting, are common. Harsh lighting draws attention to specific spots in a scene, allowing for dark shadows in the surrounding area. Low-key lighting (not to be confused with low lighting) illuminates things from underneath, giving an ominous or creepy vibe to a scene. Low lighting is just that—it’s difficult for your characters to see. In full darkness, they shouldn’t be able to do things the same way they do in the light. If they can, they’d better have superpowers or technological advantages.
Since we don’t have the luxury of studio lights in our writing, we have to rely on practical, ambient and tonal descriptions, keeping the scenes active and not bogging down the pace. Lamps, candles, spotlights, neon signs, Christmas lights, lighters, or flashlights all create a specific type of illumination that your reader can identify with. Ambient periods — sunrise, high noon, sunset, midnight, cloudy days—these provide an overall environment the reader relates to, and the action in your writing should reflect this. Warm tones convey comfort, hope and happiness, while cool tones show loneliness or hard times, and the further desaturated a scene becomes, the colder the existence becomes. Science fiction is often cool-toned, while romance is usually warm-toned.
Action gets the best of everything and adapts itself to the world it exists in.
In the first chapter of Brent Weeks’ The Way of Shadows, lighting is effectively used to convey a host of information:
The sun wouldn’t come up for hours, and the tavern was empty.
A couple of lamps were still burning in the tavern, so light filtered through the gaps, illuminating the mud…
Heavy marsh mist climbed the shafts of light only to fall over and over again.
A telltale metallic gleam…
He couldn’t see anyone through the gaps.
A few feet away, something was dripping from the boards into a puddle. It was too dark to see what it was, but it didn’t take much imagination to guess.
Something flashed in front of his nose…so close it took a moment to focus.
All these little snippets of light are painting our scene while our character is under some floorboards to collect lost coins, trying to remain quiet as a fight to the death occurs on the floor above him. A deadly spider is crawling up his leg, and a sword comes through a floor gap directly in front of him.
We know it’s dark, but not so dark it’s impossible to see. Even if the mud is cold, the lanterns give a warm glow. The mist cools things down with its associated white-blue tinge (although we can describe mists in many ways, the default is often cool white). The mist would also change the way we’d focus and make what we see hazy. We know it’s getting darker- either the lanterns are giving up, or the bodies are blocking the little light there was. The decreasing light means anything dark-on-dark, or too close in light value, can’t be discerned. But there’s still enough light for the metal of the sword to flash.
Never underestimate the power of lighting a scene. While we often focus on the big picture, it’s those small details that rope your reader in to the action.
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