Lighting in horror - rotating lights

Personally, I have always liked how rotating lights can inspire ffelings of panic within an atmosphere. When I see flashing lights in my day to day setting, it usually denotes one of two things; fire alarm or emergency services. Rotating lights create a sense of urgency or emergency, hence why there are used by the emergency services and fire alarms. In my experience, rotating lights usually indicate that something is about to explode or self destruct, the bottom line being that something bad is about to happen.

http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/8200000/Aliens-Poster-alien-aliens-8225375-991-1500.jpg

Aliens (1986) uses rotating lights very well to create inspire feelings of panic. Below is a scene from the film in which our central characters Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Newt (Carrie Henn) are making their escape from the belly of the Alien nest to try and reach their ship on the upper levels for extraction before the facility explodes. The first two and a half minutes of this video display this scene. Apologies for the quality of the video as this is the only clip I could find with this scene.

The rotating lights in this scene are amber, creating a sense of urgency within the alert. Amber is used for traffic lights and is known for giving feelings of warmth and calmness. In this scene, feelings of warmth are contrasted because amber has been used here as an obvious colour, to highlight the urgency behind this alarm, to encourage those still within range of the imminent blast to evacuate and reach a safe distance. Once outside the nest, they reach the extraction point, but there is no ship there waiting to pick them up. To make things worse, the Alien queen has made her way to the same level using the same service elevators. This evokes panic in the audience because the mother-of-all aliens is going to kill them and they have no means of escape. The flashing lights adds to these feeling of panic because again, there is still a sense of urgency to escape before the facility explodes. 

This encouraged me to do my own rotating lights test, using this film scene as inspiration.

Design stages

This was one of my most challenging and proudest tests to-date, unfortunately, I only saved progress three times so there aren't many differences in terms of content for each file, so it skips a lot of the important design steps I took.

1. I started by making the shape of the room using the square tool
2. Next, I created the shape of the shutters and the space for the loading area using the insert edge loop tool
3. After that, I extruded the shape of the door backwards slightly to give it a sense of depth
4. Next, I took a sphere, halved it and flipped it upside down, keeping the flat side closest to the ceiling
5. Then, I duplicated the light mesh two more times to add more lights to the scene
6. I added a touch of transparency to the light meshes to create the aesthetic of glass material
7. Using red coloured spotlights, I keyed the centre light in a clockwise rotation and the left and right lights in a counter-clockwise rotation
8. I added a volume light to each light-shaped mesh to ensure that there was on the ceiling as well as the directions in which the spotlights were facing.
9.  Using the create 3D container tool, I added some fog to create a more ominous atmosphere 
10. I animated the fog to give it some movement by manipulating and keying the translation settings.
11. With the two texture files I had found online (locations submitted in my deliverables) I textured the shutters and the loading area.
12. Next, I animated the shutters by opening it halfway and keying it in on the timeline from start to finish.
13. Batch render
14. I loaded the batch render into Adobe Premiere Pro.
15. Finally, I adjusted the frame size settings and exported the rendered sequence into AVI form.

What relevance does this test provide towards the development of my project and horror?

Horror is used to inspire fear. Fear can be inspired using particular lighting techniques, in this case rotating lights. With this lighting test, I will now be able to locate other lighting techniques that evoke feelings/emotions/moods such as panic and use them to develop a higher quality of lighting within my 3D environment, as well as more effective horror atmosphere.