Why I’m doing this
While testing lighting in Unreal Engine, I noticed a “small tweak, big change” effect: tiny shifts in direction, intensity, colour temperature or contrast could flip a scene’s mood and push a character from approachable to distant, from trustworthy to threatening. I stopped thinking of lighting as just “making things visible” and started asking what each light says—where it steers the viewer’s eye and how it quietly tells us to read a person.
Title & Core Question
Working Title: The Role of Lighting in Character Development in Contemporary Animation, Film and Games
Research Question: How does lighting shape the audience’s understanding of characters in contemporary animation, film and games?
My position
Lighting is not a neutral setting; it’s a visual language with a point of view. Choices about direction, intensity, colour and contrast actively encode a character’s mood, traits, social status and moral position. In mainstream practice, familiar patterns—warm soft key for “positive” characters, low-key hard shadows for villains, and “beauty lighting” for women—invite quick audience judgements and, if unexamined, can reinforce stereotypes.
I aim to show, through historical and contemporary cases, that conscious, ethically minded lighting can move beyond formulas and produce characters who feel more complex, dimensional and inclusive. This matters to my future as a lighting artist in animation/games: lighting should look good, and it should serve story and character.
What I’ll look at
To avoid a single-medium bias, I’m comparing film + animation + games to see how different grammars converge in shaping character.
Raise the Red Lantern (1991, Zhang Yimou)
Farewell My Concubine (1993, Chen Kaige)
In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-wai)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018, animation)
Genshin Impact (2020, miHoYo/HoYoverse)
Sky: Children of the Light (2019, thatgamecompany)
What I want to achieve
I want “lighting = expressive system” to become a real creative standard in my practice. When I choose a key, push a rim, or warm/cool a scene, I’ll also ask: What reading of the character am I creating? If the answer is only “it looks nice,” I’ll keep working. If the answer is “it makes the character clearer, more dimensional, and more respected,” that’s the light I’m after.