The reason behind me choosing this course was primarily because I haven’t learnt much about lighting since the conclusion of my Screen and Media TAFE course in 2015, and even then I learnt primarily about the practical aspects of lighting and neglected a lot of the theoretical knowledge. My teacher was a brilliant Californian woman who drove trucks and did gaffer work on Hollywood films, she taught me many things, like the various lights from Fresnel to Kino flo to dedo, and how to calculate how many amps will be drawn from the lights you use. That you should always say “striking” before turning on a light and to NEVER touch barn doors without using a C-47 (AKA a clothes peg). But what appealed about Robins studio was that he was basing it around a theoretically approach to lighting, which is something I really want to learn more about. Especially as I know from last semester’s studio how Robin approaches teaching and thought given that, that this studio would be very insightful.
I am especially enjoying the exercises in class, as Robin is breaking down how light works in a way that I understand and then letting us interpret that relayed information with our own group shoots, before we all come together to analyse what was shot. We have also looked at scenes from films and analysed them and I would really like to continue doing this as it will help me learn how to emulate these lighting conditions in my own work and be inspired by them. I feel like these exercises will allow us to incrementally build up our lighting knowhow or lighting information bank, if you will. These are my expectations of the course, I feel like they are very realistic and I’m enjoying the studio a lot so far.
Other Film Light related blog posts:
Film Light – Week 2 – Analysing a Closely Linked Artwork and Scene