This week of class was quite a practical experience. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to Tuesday’s class, which was a bummer, but it did allow me to come in with a fresh pair of eyes to the work that was done without me present.

The class did a lighting comparison between different sources, attempting to replicate sunlight coming through a window. Speaking to Tash, the wonderful model of the shoot, the original plan was to have direct proper sunlight for the first comparison, but it wasn’t strong enough. ‘Available Daylight’ was still used, but I was under the impression it wasn’t ideal. Never the less, watching through this comparison with little to no prior knowledge of it really let me judge the artificial light sources and how naturalistic it looked on camera.

On the initial viewing, the light looked semi-realistic, but if I was told the artificially assisted versions were all direct sunlight only, I would have been sceptical. To me, this is because the fill of the 2K Fresnel w/ Full Blue Gell bounced off core board w/ Fill was just a bit too dim to be sunlight, maybe very cloudy sunlight, but not direct sunlight. There are a few too many shadows on the camera right side of Tash’s face, maybe needing some more bounce and fill to even out.

Thinking like this is helpful in thinking about lighting a set I am actually on, such as Thursday’s exercise. Even though I was only an actor,  once I had my lines down, I was fully invested in thinking about how everything on set worked, specifically the lighting rigging. I was always trying to think of a new way we could light the scene and be sneaky about it, and while I only offered minimal help from my position, I was constantly taking stuff in, lets hope it sticks!