Overall course reflection

As the semester comes to a close, the overall sentiment is one of satisfaction and relief that the hard work has been completed. This work, however, has been recognised to be of great value in advancing my skills as a filmmaker and creative media practitioner. At the beginning of the unit, I did not give too much thought to the process of lighting. Even though I did try intuitively to manipulate light at times, it was not within the structure that I have since learned – a structure that now makes my practice much more effective.
A number of key specific additions to my knowledge have taken place. One of these has been the introduction to industry-grade equipment. This has involved learning their accepted names and the most effective way to use the various lights that we have come into contact with.
Through our practical projects, I have received once again the invaluable experience of getting to work within a team of media practitioners. I am of course referring to the group I had the pleasure of working with – composed of my own peers. It became self-evident over the course of the semester that the principals we were learning became more and more conducive to a larger scale team-based production. The added facet of setting up stands, lights, flags and reflectors meant that we had come to a point were becoming comfortable with collaborative production was a must. This gentle inducement to accept a new, more advanced state of creativity – a state that implies the necessity of multiple minds – was indeed a very valuable part of the course as a whole.
Along with the plethora of lighting theory and practice, we also, by necessity, were made more comfortable with other staple skills in filmmaking. Personally, I found increased consciousness of lighting set-ups made my cinematography more sophisticated. Likewise, my tendencies and intuitions in regard to set design were also advanced by the new-found sensitivity to matters of lighting.