The first week back from the mid-semester break was a bit of an adjustment. Whilst I kept my eyes out and open both during films and the world for engaging or interesting lighting occurrences,  my mind was on anything but university work, really taking the time to detox and relax with family and friends. This helped clear my mind, but might have been too effective, as getting back into the uni grind took some convincing for my mind, body and soul.

the first class back threw us straight into it, with myself directing a short scene in the upper classroom, involving a stressed-out student and a disinterested student.

The biggest issue we had with the scene was getting each character well lit and having a detailed face. We were lucky enough to have a lot of control over the manual blinds in the room, which gave us a base level of soft lighting that while wasn’t enough, was way better than just the ceiling lights.

We grabbed a 1k Fresnel light (after some funny in retrospect Benny Hill style confusion) to try and bounce some light from the white walls and roof of the space onto the faces of our actors.

The whole directing process was extremely stressful. Having to call the shots on a project you really know and have experience with is hard, now imagine doing that for a project you do not have those things for! Anxiety galore!

Let’s see how it turned out.

After discussing this both with the crew who attended on Thursday when we watched through this, as well as the whole class, the lighting is the biggest issue with the piece. Jonah is way underlit, and my handheld shot is way too shakey to work for more than a second. However, I really like the thumbnail shot, even though there is a shadow being cast behind his head. I just really like the composition and the way his shirt tones match the overcast weather outside.

This task taught me a lot about set preparation and responsibility, something that whilst isn’t fun, is something I need to keep exposing myself to in class environments, cause I know it’s gonna benefit me on real sets!

Week 6 of FIlm Light was quite busy,  but it contained one of my favourite exercises to date! Unfortunately (again), I wasn’t able to make it into class on Tuesday, due to a sustained ankle injury that left me bedridden. But I rested it right up and ready for Thursday, where I was ready to make up for it and then some. Unfortunately (seemingly becoming my catchphrase), I had to leave early, but Thursday was all about exercise 6!

From an initial glance, exercise 6 is just like every other we have been assigned in Film Light, vague scripts, basic named characters and a set time limit. But to me, this was different.  Exercise 6  had two groups capture both visuals and audio of a scene over 3 shots. However, there was a twist! Whilst the main wide and one close up mid-shot could be filmed in the same location, the other characters mid-shot had to be shot somewhere else, and we as a crew had to use lighting and camera tricks to make the scene itself as believable as possible.

This excited me for a few reasons. For one, I hadn’t been in class for a while, so it was nice to see and work with my fellow classmates, but the main intrigue of the task was how the twist was going to make us all have to recall all the skills we had previously attained throughout the course to make this location switch work, which was both terrifying and thrilling.

Tash had a great potential location, so we all went down and scouted outside the Streat cafe, with the brick walls on the buildings opposite being an easy thing to replicate.

The crew brought a little bit of everything, and whilst we never got the chance/needed to use the c-stands or shot bags, we felt safer with them. I assumed the role of first assistant director, and basically ensured that everyone understood what Tash wanted to be done, as well as cracked down on packing-up time.

The shoot itself went really well, we had enough people that everyone had a role to play in some capacity, and no one was left completely without a job. We played around with depth of field and eyelines to cheat the location, and whilst I haven’t fully analysed the footage as of yet, my initial scrub through looks as if it works. However, we kind of forgot to be conscious of the lighting, which in a lighting studio, is pretty funny.

I am going to have an edit up on my Mediafactory blog once it’s done within the next few days, but I am excited to see how it turns out! Never the less, I had so much fun working on this exercise, and hope for more like this in the future!

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!

In the reading Robin posted this week by Sven Nykvist documenting his life and views on filmmaking, one specific part stuck out and felt relatable to my whole outlook on lighting. He wrote, ‘Light is a treasure chest; once properly understood, it can bring another dimension to the medium’. This is the exact sort of epiphany I had the first time I really tried to light a scene, seeing how much potential there was in the art, and how much it can drastically change the potential of a scene.

Whilst we didn’t exactly achieve that sense of enlightenment in Exercise 4, the group definitely felt how difficult and mind straining it can be, even when a simple solution is right in front of you!

On Tuesday, Noah, Jagger, Elenor, Amelia and I were tasked with filming two shots for Exercise 4, with one of the shots requiring a lighting change, with the sun coming through the window. Luckily, we didn’t have to show the window, so this could all be done behind the scenes.

The team got really creative brainstorming different ways in which we could make this exposure change look as natural and directed as possible, like how the sun would bounce into a room. We decided we wanted to use one of the 1k Fresnel lights in some sort of way, just because we had our hands on them. Below is the video in which our test shoots are shown, starting at 3:00.

I think the main problem was that we may have thought too hard about how to make the sunbeams enter, with an easy solution there all along.

I really like how the scene is lit all together. The light itself feels really natural, and our faces are well lit. However, in the first take of the second shot, there is a glaring hot patch of over-exposed wall next to Amelia’s head. Luckily, that is not the case in the second take!

How we made the ‘sun’ come in was by moving a black bounce board away from in front of the Fresnel light. While the brightness of the light I feel looks fine, it cuts too hard a shaped shadow on the wall, being a very direct edge.

What was later pointed out to us, was that we should have just raised the blinds in the room, which would have probably worked better, and been easier! Never the less, experiences like these teach you so much about lighting, so I wouldn’t trade this version for the best version in the world! (maybe for a portfolio piece though!).

During this third week of the Film Light studio, for me, it was all about getting in front and behind the camera, and putting the information and techniques discusses and documented in week 2 into practice.

We had a few planned group members not show up, so Tash and I teamed up with Jagger, Elenor and Noah on exercise 3, which was great! They are lovely and talented people. Tash and I acted (born to be stars) in the dramatic telling of Barney and Rachel’s dinner plans. Being in front of the camera was a lot of fun, and whilst it wasn’t as technically involving (definitely want to be behind the camera next exercise, just so I can continue to familiarise myself with these depth of field and camera lighting techniques, we were both still very much involved in how it all looked. Below is a cut of what we did.

We wanted to really play around with a greater depth of field, making the shot more dynamic and interesting than a basic two-shot. The location we shot at serendipitously helped out with this, as there was a window behind the railing in which we could capture myself walking past clearly, as to notice Barney, and approach her. I feel like this worked really well, however, if this had been a professional shoot / if we had lighting kits, I would have suggested we light Rachel (myself) with a light panel or dido (not a Fresnel light though, way too much wattage). This way, I would be more visible, and my facial expressions of interest would have been clearer.

We used a white coreboard to bounce light onto Tash and I, and whilst it could have used a few more light sources to bounce off (just something that was out of our hands at the time), it worked way better than without, which has really given me a lot faith in white cardboard.

As stated before, being an actor was lots of fun, but I am very keen to get behind that camera or do something that gets me directly involved in the action!

I felt a lot more comfortable and at home with week 2’s Film Light classes. I was more used to the early wake-up times, started sitting with old and new faces, but most importantly, I am getting more and more involved in lighting thought and theory.

Some of the most useful information I gathered from these classes was the terminology. While not always directly relevant to the physical and practical aspects of lighting,  actually having more than a base understanding of camera and lighting terms and tools such as International Standards Organisation (ISO) and how it determines and can influence exposure is now integral information to me. Heck, even knowing that ISO stands for International Standards Organisation is a feat in itself. This and relatively in-depth looks at how shutter speeds and the size of the iris (known as the aperture of the lens for all us smarties over here) is information I’ve always wanted but never been motivated to learn. I am really glad we are getting into all of this stuff, because it’s definitely going to help my filmmaking, no matter what position I hold.

However, I am not a fan of how these terms are often calculated in opposite ways, such as how the higher the f-stop, the less light is able to enter the lens. It completely throws my prior knowledge of bigger and smaller numbers out the window!

I also enjoyed learning about more adjustable camera features, and how they can affect lighting a scene, such as focal length, depth of field and the surprise underdog, ensuring your viewfinder is set at the ideal settings so what you see on there is what you get in post-production. This is something I had never thought of, but will now always be cautious (more like paranoid) about it before a shoot.

I’m interested to see where this class goes, and very excited to start lighting scenes, with both natural and artificial light!

Looking over what we shot during the first class, with a better understanding of lighting terms and types from the second class, it is easy to see that exposure was a big issue with how our interviews turned out. Whilst preparing for the interview to be shot, I thought the exposure was fine, a little overexposed, but it looked nice in the viewfinder to me. However, once assessing this both in class together, and outside of class to write this, it’s easy to see how overexposed it actually is. This has now made me more aware and hopefully more cautious about how an exposure can look through a viewfinder compared to when seen on a more dynamic and rich screen, and not to underestimate the soft lighting power of a flat, overcast day.

Robyn also suggested we take this newfound knowledge, and observe, whether it be with the world around us, or the media we engage with. Similarly to how I know notice when audio is slightly out of sync because of a bad merge in movies and television, this information can and has come as a burden on my viewing experiences. For example, whilst watching some casual television with a friend, I found myself constantly and subtly analysing the lighting in shots. Whether it was a hard or soft lighting set up, where the artificial light sources are and what is natural lighting (as the show was not always shot in a studio), and of course, which side of their face is lit (which Paul has ingrained in my brain eternally.

I am really excited to see where this course goes, because the more classes we have, the more I realise how much lighting theory I have barely scratched the surface of, and how much that theory gets me excited to put it into practice!