Mood Lighting
Mood Lighting For A More Immersive Experience
Before we watch a movie we can prime ourselves and our audience to be more engaged and immersed in the atmosphere.
Imagine getting ready to watch a Horror Film, like “An American Werewolf In London” with a foggy lighting scene in the background of the room. “Stay Off The Moors” gives you an emotional chill up your spine as the brain takes in and processes the ‘danger’ of your environment.
The result is a more engrossing, fun, experience. You can use mood lighting to tailor your room for different movie genres. Different lighting scenes for action, horror, sci-fi, romantic movies.
What Is Mood Lighting?
Mood lighting is illumination, designed to create a temporary state of mind or feeling. It’s using colours, intensity and depth of light to give a room an atmospheric feel.
Traditionally you can think of the feeling seeing a warm fire, flames flickering, gives you when coming in from the cold. Just seeing the coloured patterns dance around the fire and reflect off walls can produce emotions of warmth, safeness and relaxation.
That’s one example, another is how brighter, cooler whites and blues can be used to cool down a room or invigorate work places whilst warmer hues are used to aid in relaxation. That’s one of the reasons that factory lights are always very cool whites, to keep people alert.
How Does This Work In Home Cinema?
In a dedicated cinema room we work hard to control the light within the room by using black-out curtains or not having any windows at all. Combined with smart dimming or control systems this allows us to get really creative with light.
An Example Of Setting Lighting Scenes
We are kitting out our home cinema demo room at the moment and including some really cool lighting features.
As part of our demo room we have a mural wall, with a Scandinavian forest scene.
We have used a few Philips Hue colour changing bulbs overhead and by using subtle shades of colour and dimming we are able to drastically change the atmosphere and feel of the room. A flash of Blue makes it feel cold and snowy, a very cool white gives it a fog effect and a light splashing of orange makes it feel like dawn.
Additionally we mounted a hidden spotlight and bounce the light off the wall (top left of the images) to simulate the sun or the moon, we can turn this on or off, vary it’s intensity and change its colour.
