Seven

Seven - Environment and Lighting Study

This work was inspired by the movie 'Seven: Sins of a Serial Killer', directed by David Fincher, cinematographer Darius Khondji. Reading suggestion: https://ascmag.com/articles/flashback-seven-1995 . The movie inspires tension through the whole story and emphasis the contrast of 'good' and 'bad' along the story. I really think they matched very well the lighting with the story, and that's what I tried to do here. I started by gathering references and I decided that I would do an hybrid environment mixing some scenes of the movie, but I should try to keep the tension going.

Since the main goal was to inspire tension, I tried to play hard with greens, reds and value. First part of the scene you're in a wider space with more lights, but there's not much light coming from outside. Even if you can see the window, what's  actually lighting the space are those green-yellowish ceiling lights. 

Then we look to that corridor and there's much less value, it's a darker space with a stair at the end to give depth and encourage the player to go through that mysterious corridor. And then you get to the point of interest, where the scene happens, and where you get the answers you were looking for. So there I've chosen a more direct approach for the color key, the red-green contrast is boosted on that darkroom and the bathtub.