Base on the movies; dramas or in different media pieces I have seen, I have a clear idea that lighting plays an important role in most of the media piece. I am a photography lover, I carried my camera around a lot in my free time, which I am pretty sure that lighting in photography is a key element because it changes the atmosphere of a photograph. I remembered Robin has highlighted a point in both classes in our first week: there is always some lighting if you have exposure, there must be lightings. However, even though I know how important lighting is in any media productions, I didn’t really have a chance to really learn what is lighting, and how does lighting work effectively in a media production. This is one of the main reason that made me choose to participate in this course.

My aspiration for this semester first is to gain a basic understanding of lighting. Secondly, I want myself to get used to thinking about lighting no matter what I saw, I remembered in Media 1 my tutor reminded us that even we are just media students, it’s time to start to think as a media maker, and we need to get used to think as a media maker.  Furthermore, I wish what I will learn from this course can apply in my future career, based on my experience so far, I always have no idea how can I adjust the lights in my previous studio projects. Throughout this studio, I hope I will at least able adjust the lighting for my own work.

Exercise 1 review:

I actually do like the lighting of our group, the lighting of our interview was harder than rest of the groups because we let the interviewee sit right next to the window. Half of Yolanda’s face was overexposed because she sits next to the window, the hard lighting made our lighting slightly overexposed. Another thing that found interesting was most of us thought black and white look nicer than coloured, since the space was very limited so we didn’t really get any choice on choosing where to shoot at. When the subjects in a frame/ scene are looking too messy or complex, turn it into black and white will make the scene look way much better.

One thing I have learnt in the first class is natural lighting keep changes every single second. For example, if we are shooting a huge scene for the whole afternoon we will get different lighting. In order to avoid this happening and also to keep the continuity, we need to let lighting elaborate in media production. Something I would consider to change: if we can have a better choice of background I think I will let my interviewee being filmed at a simpler background, maybe with a single colour background. Second, I will move my interviewee to not sit too close to the window to avoid overexposure.