Test Lighting & Colour Correction

I went out to do some test shooting in the dark as most of the films (Fight Club, Social Network, Se7en & Panic Room) are mostly at night when outside and dark when inside. I took my friend with me to look for locations to shoot with reasonable lighting and quite dirty areas with graffiti or just generally dirty to give it a grimy effect. These shots were meant to just be for test of getting areas and finding light sources but they turned up to be quite good and I will use them in my video.

Here are some stills from my first shoot after being colour corrected to create different effects. Some of them have been edited too much and there is too much darkness. I did this to see what sort of images I could possibly get from the lighting conditions I shot them in.

For this shot I was playing around with the camera angle and just seeing what might look good. The composition I like and the lighting on the character is nice with the hard shadows on the side of his face. I found a nice spot where I could stand right under a lamp post because there was a wall next to it, I got my character to stand on it so that he would be closer to the light.

For this shot I was trying to get the same sort of lighting and colouring on my character as Brad Pitt in this scene above. When comparing them you can see that the shadow on my character is much more darker and covers a bigger area of his body than the Brad Pitt and also the yellow on my shot is too much and should be toned down a bit. 

I really like the composition of this shot as everything in it are straight lines and the character is in between two cracks in the wall which centre him into his own third of the shot. The shadows on this shot are too hard on the character which should be corrected.

This shot I made the character face into the light so that the exposure on his face was better. I like the look of this shot but I won't use this colour if I put it into my video as it doesn't have the same appeal as a David Fincher film, I will just need to adjust the colour correction to match one.

I tried to get the composition and lighting perfect for each shot and I feel that these do look quite good. I was testing for what kind of exposure and how much lighting I would need to make the effect that I feel would match the films. Some of these shots I feel work really well and match the colouring to some of David Finchers films.