How I came to be in Robin’s ‘Film Light’ studio is actually quite an entertaining story. Maybe only entertaining to myself though? Essentially when I rocked up to the studio presentation day I ran into my old studio head Paul, and he said to me “Hey Louise, why aren’t you talking to any of the studio heads?”. Because they’d recently introduced this ‘new way of doing things’ where instead of the studio heads presenting their studios to the class, they would simply stand there and you could go and ask them questions about their studios. Which for me is extremely devastating news as I make quite a consistent effort to talk to as few people as possible. So of course I replied to Paul “Well which studio do you think I should do?” and Paul replied “I think you’d love Robin’s studio”. And that was that, it was sorted. I put Robin’s studio as my first preference and indeed I got it and here I am, and Paul was right, I do love it.

I guess I didn’t have a crazy number of expectations regarding this studio, but it’s most certainly exceeded most of those. My main expectation was to understand the technical aspects of lighting a scene to a greater extent, as well as increasing my ability to ‘artificially’ light a scene, with hot and heavy lights and such. However, I was happily surprised to not only be learning those things but to also be learning a theoretical framework of how to view, understand and apply lighting principals.

From the very first lesson Robin focused heavily on getting us to use light that is readily available as well as ‘read’ scenes for their lighting quality and to appreciate what light is available in any given environment. Which is a great fundamental base to start on, rather than to begin with a ‘three-point-lighting’ setup which encourages you to view ‘lighting’ as the simple act of adding light to a room. As Robin made clear light is present in essentially all environments, so to ‘light’ a scene is not only to add addition lights but to work with what light is already there.

Post One: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/louise-wilson/2018/03/09/week-1-reflection/

Post Two: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/louise-wilson/2018/03/09/week-2-reflection/

Post Three: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/louise-wilson/2018/03/09/reflection-film-scene/

Post Four: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/louise-wilson/2018/03/09/reflection-art/

Until next time,

Louise Wilson