Saving Private Ryan is an Epic / war film with historical events and interprets them in a larger scale. Historical accuracy is not the main focus in Epics films like Saving Private Ryan, but rather the telling of a story like what Captain Miller and his men go through in finding Private Ryan and returning him back home. Hinting into the Dram / War and historical events all in one film with many little twist. Twist in the sense of what the men go through psychologically and physical during their journey in Saving Private Ryan.
Lighting played a big role in the making of this film, the directors and cinematographer had to rely on lighting to tell the story. Lighting creates the mood and atmosphere to its audience, this movie is mostly based with low-key lighting. Low-Key lighting is when the lighting of a scene is very dark, with shadows and only a few bright spots. This helps create tension in a scene, and indicates that something is about to happen, or to emphasize a subdued mood within the scene.
During the scene shown above low-key lighting was used in the beginning of the scene but the directors and cinematographer did a great job with transitions to what is known as three-point light. The transition can be scene when the snipers are looking through their scope and what’s starts out as low-key lighting transitions to a three-point lighting scene. As we can see when the light focuses on the faces of the snipers right before they take their shots. As we see in the image below low-key lighting was the main focus throughout this film.
Very few scenes within this film where high-key lighting, high-key lighting is when a shot is evenly lit with few dark areas. There tends not to be a lot of tension and excitement within scenes like we see in the images below.
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