In our Tuesday class we went without our usual film and lighting kit and watched clips of film from a selection curated by Robin. Looking at these films with the purpose of analysing and discussing their lighting techniques. We watched a variety of snippets from older films like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and The Magic Box (1951). In both of these films there’s an unrealistic nature to the lighting of a scene. Overall I found the process of looking over these films and discussing the lighting extremely interesting and useful. Robin touched on the lighting style of these cinematographers and how most of them probably didn’t intend to create a style, it more so happens naturally. I’m eager to develop my own style but this, I think,  will come and I does not have to be forced. 

We also spoke about the technicolour process. Like many of the old filmmaking techniques I found this quite fascinating. The use of a beam splitting prism to create an exposure on three different pieces of film, to then take those pieces of film, dye them and stitch them together to create a colour image is crazy. Definitely shocked me to find out this was the process involved.

In our Thursday workshop we aimed to set up a latitude test set with a human subject focusing on the latitude we can gain from the camera when correcting it in post production. This was the first time we were introduced to a light metre. Understanding how these devices work was definitely a useful activity. In the current digital age, light meters aren’t as widespread as they used to be. However, as Robin pointed out these can still be utilised to for a variety of different reasons including having more precise control over your images and matching shots on different days or different locations. While providing filmmakers with a potentially faster setup process and making post production easier.