For this semester, I’m interested in the technical aspect of how lighting in a film can affect the quality of the production.

Basically I want to understand how lights affect the subject or even my perception of the subject. By watching films so far I know how important lights are and I’ve also found out that lights placed in certain positions can help object pop up more, or even appear more 3-dimensional in the shot. That will be something that I’ll try to achieve.

There are two ways I’m approaching this

First is to do a series of shots to investigate the question of how lighting can affect the shot.

Using the reverse-engineering process to deconstruct a scene and then try to copy that in my shots. This process will allow me to understand how the lighting director planned the lights in that particular shot to see what he was trying to achieve and also for me to see how I can use these underlying principles to create my own shots.

I want to just use simple scenes eg, portrait to compare natural lighting and artificial lighting. Just to see the difference that can be made with and without artificial lights in any production.

Second way is collaboration with other filmmakers. I managed to get in contact with group of students in our media studies that are thinking of working on a film. Basically they will be the ones production, they do all directing, casting, script. What I’ll do is just to provide lighting.

This allows me to experiment with whatever I’ve found out in my previous investigation and I think this also allows me to focus purely on the lighting aspect and how I can communicate with the director in terms of the shots they want.

What I want from this semester and the projects that I’m undertaking is to increase my knowledge in terms of this area, and be confident in using lights, I want to use them in my own personal projects as well, just to make upgrade my filmmaking skills, giving my videos a more professional feel.