Lighting

We never had this in our first year, which was a real shame. Imagine, we're second-year film students and we're clueless about lights and lighting techniques. At least this academic year, we have a lot more intensive lessons on camera, lighting and cinematography. We've had a couple of lessons and they were very useful and practical.

We were given exercises and scenarios to create. It wasn't so much of mimicking but really trying to achieve certain forms of lighting and learning what effects different lights bring.



One of the exercises was to light an object up without creating shadows. We thought it was going to be difficult but we figured the trick to doing that from experimenting and putting together different lights and filters. And the trick was to shine soft light on the object and that would create a very faint shadow or no shadow at all. So if you saw the picture on the right, we bounced light off a styrofoam board and further soften the light with a diffusers. At the end, the whole setup looked like some science experiment.

Then we were given the exercise to create sunlight. For that, many of us automatically grabbed HMIs. HMIs are lights that are made to literally produce light of similar colour temperature as the sun. To make it look like the evening sun, we added an orange gel, the proper name being Colour Temperature Orange (CTB). (Something we found out not too long ago as well.)




The following lesson was a lot more challenging. We were given commercial ads that had models posed nicely. And we had to identify the setup that was used to achieve the look. This was more of a mimic now, but it taught us pretty well, because we had to learn from experience. So we had some of us posed and then we put up the lights. Overall, we did pretty decent jobs and I can't emphasise it more; that we learnt a lot.




Then we lit up glassware, with reference to beer ads. It was pretty interesting and another challenge altogether. I remember a lesson I had last semester, about 3-point lighting and also colour temperature.

image from wikipedia

3-point lighting is almost like a standard setup. How we achieve different stuff is really based on creativity, on working around. There isn't really a hard and fast fixed method to achieving anything.

This entry would probably serve to remind me of the lessons in lighting. It was a module truly appreciated.

Yay, its the first post of the month and I'm here to lament. School starts in a day to be exact. Boohoo. Ok not that I hate school. I chose to go back to it to start with. But on first look at my timetable, its 9-6 mondays to fridays. >.> And it dawned on me that we're seniors now. =/

So holidays have ended. And I've not achieved all that I've set out to do during the hols, one of which is packing my room. I never got down to doing it. I never got down to doing a lot of things particularly because my time was given to work and spending time with people. Well I guess its time to adjust back to school life again.

We just had nice birthday dinner for dad at The Paramount. The Paramount had been around for many years. It's a restaurant under Tung Lok. People who love chinese ala carte buffets should go there. Besides, we were served by a waitress who was awesome. She was so attentive and friendly to us. Last Saturday, we met up with friends at Oosh, a semi luxurious place located at Demsey for dining and drinking. I had never heard of the place prior to last week and I thought the name sounds kind of dodgy. But it is different from what I thought it was. The place is huge with multiple dining areas both indoors and outdoors, so atmosphere and setting are wonderful. The food was pretty good but quite overpriced. I guess sometimes its the kind of people that go there too. We drove into the restaurant's private car park and saw a lambo and a porche. That makes me uneasy about that place to be honest. Anyway, no reviews for The Paramount and Oosh. If you are really curious, go check them out. These places taught me that dining isn't just about food, it's an experience. Some people call it a lifestyle. But believe it or not, I eat to live.

I'm am so going to be challenged by my resolution to keep the Sabbath holy. Because I hadn't been doing so last semester and I suffered spiritually. I guess its true that disobedience has its consequence. It's time again to look at my vision in film, an end result I'm working towards. It gets clearer and clearer what I want to do. Facing the Giants and Fireproof have been a great source of inspiration and that is where I want to go.