– Monday Class – 

Through experience in groups, I got to know how lighting can really change the feeling/ emotion of a piece of media. We spent a long time to decide where the interviewee should sit, how to use the reflector and whether to use white or black one.

In the first shot, we place the white reflector on the left of the interviewee, which is letting the light source from the window bounce back to the subject’s face. Moving on to the second shot, we used two reflectors, both black and white reflect board. Since there is another window at subject’s right-hand corner, the light still came through. We used a black reflector to block interviewee’s left right side but we thought this is making the subject too dark, so we used a white reflector at the bottom of interviewee’s face let the light source from the window bounce back to interviewee’s face.

The first shot had a warm colour tone, the second shot was in a cold tone since we have brought the black reflector to block the light from the back corner. Other than the colour tone, using a black reflector to create shadow made my face looked smaller, the shadow helped to distinct my facial features because of the white reflector at the bottom reflect light on the other side of my face. Moreover, using reflectors also helped to express emotion to the audience. We didn’t turn the volume up when we rewound to select the best one, the first one with the warm tone seemed to be more cheerful, whereas the second tone with black reflector seemed sombre.

It was an amazing experience done by ourselves, I really like the way how we got chance to watch how Robin adjusts the lighting but also get a chance to play with the lighting ourselves.

– 1st –

– 2nd –

– Wednesday Class – 

From the first part of today’s class, the scene from the film ‘In the City of Sylvia’ really impressed me. Every single shot was so well considered and organised, the lightings were done in detailed, the choice of focal point and depth of field, everything was arranged deliberately. I am going to download the film and watch over the weekend, the details in the short clip really surprised me.

In today’s class, we spent most of our time on a lighting set-up practice, we had one key lighting, tried out different ways of fill lighting and also backlight from the top. Throughout the practice, I kept considering why are things different when we see from the camera to human eyes.

When I see through a camera lens, my first feeling was, I light what I see with naked eyes better. Secondly, the subject seemed to have a higher contrast than naked eyes, the key lighting look harder in the camera than our naked eyes. I was considering this is because a camera is more sensitive to light sources, so it caught the key light more accurately than a human eye. Moreover, I thought another reason that makes the subject seemed softer with naked eyes was that our eyes were being affected by other light sources in the classroom, whereas the camera sensed the key light as the strongest light source. At last, Robin explained the purpose of this exercise. It’s actually a further extension of week 1 class, what we see with our naked eyes is different to what we will see from a camera. So if I want to get the same lighting as what I saw with my eyes, that’s when we need lighting, lighting will be the best tool to help us represent what we want.