Mil3ven vs Byler field scene lighting analysis - please read, I put a LOT of effort into this one
TLDR: the Mil3ven field scene is intentionally lit poorly to throw us off, whereas the byler field scene is lit well to make us more invested. And I have hard evidence.
This discrepancy has been really bugging me ever since vol 1 came out lol.
In the Mil3ven field scene, after they hug (no kiss btw) Mike and El turn around to look at the other characters. When they do this, they face the sun and both visibly squint. It's so blatant.
Now this might seem insignificant, but it's actually something that filmmakers usually work extremely hard to avoid! The sun shining in your actors' faces makes them squint, it's distracting and it highlights all the blemishes on their faces which makes them look worse. Luckily there are numerous ways to avoid this happening. The simplest way is to just have the sun behind them/on the side (aka film this at a different time of day or facing a different direction) and light the dark bits with artifical lights or a big white sheet that reflects the sun's light. (If you wanna know more I recently watched this very good video essay about cinematography and lighting!! https://youtu.be/F4Nv7mxoIGY?si=RtsEh75yRxf59DxM )
Anyway the sheet looks something like this...
Here it's being used in the Byler field scene to create a nice soft light from the side. And they actually do use something similar in the Mil3ven scene, as we can see here:
Except they aren't using it to gently diffuse light over the actors in a nice way, they are reflecting the sun up into the actors faces! So why on earth would they intentionally film this scene poorly when they have the tools to do it right? It makes no sense. Any self respecting filmmaker would have reshot the Mil3ven scene to avoid the sun being in their faces. I mean, filmmakers go to crazy lengths to do this: there's one film in which an entire village set was covered in a massive sheet to block out the sun so they could light it artificially. This is a big cinematography no-no.
Unless you WANT it to look unflattering. Unless you want it to look awkward, and uncomfortable, and to burst the romantic bubble.
That brings me onto the Byler field scene:
In contrast with the Mil3ven scene, this one is perfectly lit. There's a warm light on both Mike and Will (notably the light in the Mil3ven scene is colder). And when we get to their close ups, where they are standing facing one another, the lighting is pretty consistent on both of them. This means that they used artificial light or reflected the light in this scene to make it look good.
They also clearly changed the direction the actors were standing/reshot at a different time/etc., to make the sunlight come from a different direction, because the sun shifts positions from here:
(They both turn 90 degrees, so the sun should be behind Will and facing Mike, but it's not! They did some cinematic trickery here to make sure the light wasn't in Mike's face. If you're not convinced, check the image right before this and you'll see that when Mike is facing Will, the sun is shining in his face. But for the close-ups they changed it.)
Not only does this show that the filmmakers know how to light their shots well, and they have done it before, but it also shows where their priorities lie. The Mil3ven scene is meant to look bad. The byler scene is meant to look good.
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