Film Lighting is a class that takes up five hours every Thursday afternoon. Despite this rather serious drawback, I really like this class. It's definitely fulfilled a promise the prof made on the first day: You will never watch a movie the same way again.
For example, while watching the movie The Rock, there's a scene in which Sean Connery is taken out of his prison cell. Everyone else in the theatre is watching Connery; I'm looking at the floor lights, which look like broads set up to light the scene, and boy, they look cool.
The first half of every class is lecture and theory: here's what you read, here are some examples that we can watch over and over and over again. (What did film students do before video?)
The second half is lab. We go down to the studio and set up lighting situations that the prof gives us. There is no better way to learn it, as there is no better way to learn anything than to do it. We can theorize everything to death in Part I, and then learn in Part II that we don't know a baby junior from a Par, let alone how to get rid of that damn shadow under the talent's chin.
But not today. No, today for Part II we headed down to the studio and the prof answered our questions. What's that? What's that? Partially our inquisitiveness was due to the fact that we'd just gotten our take-home exam and we have to identify things. But it was also just fun to go through things and see if we could name everything. C-clamp! Mafer clamp! C-47 clamp! (This last one, by the way, is also known as a "clothespin".)
The pinnacle of excitement came when the prof explained the differences between "gobo," "cookie," and "pattern." (For those o' you who can't go a moment more without my clarifying this:
I think.
Last Updated: 13-Jun-96
©1996 Diane Patterson