For my week 12 reflection I’ve decided to reflect on the studio as a whole even though Robin said he doesn’t expect some kind of ‘studio summary’ from us, bey hey imma do it anyway.

I guess when I first started this studio I didn’t really know what to expect from it. I did assume that it would be hard and quite technical as I’m not super experienced with lighting for film and am aware of how technical the process of lighting is. Completing this studio just made me realise that lighting is even more technical than I thought, however it can be quite easy! Maybe this makes no sense, let me explain. In order to be a great cinematographer it is important to have a great amount of knowledge regarding what different lights are capable of, what their colour temperatures are, how consistent they are etc, how much light you need to get the exposure you want (when working with film), how adjusting aperture, iso and shutter speed will effect your shot, plus 6000 other things.

However, even if your not on top of all these various pieces of information you can still create great lighting for film, you just need to give it a go. Grab some lights and just start trying to work it out, go through the motions, keep trying things until something works. We did so many exercises in class like this, where we just had a bunch of lights and various cutters. Rather than have some overarching plan of how to setup the lights we just kept trying different setups until the lighting was reminiscent of something that we wanted. When it comes to approaching a new skill, half the battle is feeling comfortable enough to even try and the only way to build up that confidence is by exposure. You just need someone to throw you in the deep end, til you begin to realise it’s not so deep. These in class exercises really helped me understand that there’s always more information for you to learn which will help you become a better cinematographer, but ‘doing the thing’ is much more important than standing back because you feel like you don’t know enough.

I also really enjoyed watching all of the various clips that Robin showed us in class. I now have a long list of films I need to download. I think every time Robin showed the class a clip we never wanted the clip to stop, when it did we had just been so drawn into the film that we wanted to watch the whole thing. These clips were really great ways to visually absorb ways of lighting a scene for different lighting conditions and to help you realise that even though it may look obvious at the time, its often not obvious whilst watching the film. Overall I’m really glad that I picked this studio as I feel like I’ve developed a much greater understanding of how to light a scene, as well as how to analyse lighting within film and then apply that approach to my own work.

Until next time,

Louise Wilson