I mentioned briefly the use of gels on our lights, and all our lights are gelled in this scene. Gels are awesome for a lot of reasons—for one, we’re able to create a nighttime color temperature in the scene while shooting at 4 in the afternoon. Gels are also interesting because they add a cast to everything and reduce color contrast by pushing all our colors just a little to one side of the color spectrum. In other words, it helps to unify the color in the space, which can be nice if you’ve got some clashing colors. This is made even easier when we’re dealing with neutrals that basically have no color until we make it ourselves. Now that white wall and these grey curtains are suddenly very blue.

You may be asking “why don’t you just change white balance in post”? And that would kind of work but there are a couple differences. One, the saturation of the gel is variable depending on light power output. Lights at lower power are more saturated with gels, whereas brighter lights leave a less saturated cast. So if you’ve got different strength lights, you may have some variability in color resulting from both those lights. Also, you might be able to get away with faking it in post if all your lights are gelled the same color—but ours weren’t. That light behind the plastic has a teal gel, while the rest have CTB gels. You’d be hard pressed to imitate a mixing of color temperatures in post.

So we covered staging and props, we covered lighting and we covered color, so let’s circle back to concept, which has been sort of developing iteratively as the whole scene comes together, and we’ll walk through the final results.

To recap: we started with this film noir idea which was inspired primarily by wardrobe and by the look of our models. I knew I wanted to shoot in the living room for space and variety purposes, but it needed some serious attention to make it work with the film noir vibe. Enter plastic wrap, which served as a convenient and cheap way to partition space and add texture—it also works with the concept of murder and mayhem; by obscuring areas and acting as a barrier, it adds a sense of mystery. I also like that it is this kind of clinical and sterile material, which maybe adds this sense of detachment and coldness—potential traits of our femme fatale.

Next we added some contrasty light for a dramatic flair, and gelled everything blue to make it look like night time. The blue also adds a psychological component to the scene—not only do we associate the color blue with nighttime, but also with feelings of isolation, melancholy and calculated intelligence. While the scene is almost overwhelmingly blue, we do have a few areas of accent colors that deviate from the monochromatic palette—most notably in the bright red lips of our killer (red being the color of passion), and more ironically, in the orange pants of our dead woman, (orange being the complimentary color to blue, and a color typically associated with warmth and happiness). This juxtaposes nicely with the cool dead skin of our model, who would otherwise fade into the background without that pop of color to draw our eye to her.

Speaking of styling, our outfits now fit really well into the scene, given the concept and the palette. Along with her orange pants, our victim is wearing a teal top that matches the overall blue tones of our scene quite nicely. Her outfit and styling is also very conservative, in contrast to our murderess who is much more seductive with her perfectly coiffed Veronica Lake blonde waves, red lip and slinky silver dress.

The jewelry was the last piece of the puzzle. I almost left it out, wondering if it’d be too obvious, but decided to give it a go. I really liked how our femme fatale was utilizing it as a prop so we went with it, and it ended up really tying the story together by providing a little more context as to why our murder occurred. It still leaves you wondering why, and what happens next, but lets the audience in on a little more of the story.