When we were first given this assessment to do, I thought I might as well pack my bags and move to a far away country and kiss this course good bye. I feel quite comfortable with the cameras in class, and our experience with The Bum-Clocks helped reiterate this. I work well with the others in the group and feel comfortable knowing we’re all on the same boat, relatively speaking. However, when it comes to doing absolutely everything myself, I completely freak out! Judging by our last formative assessment, I thought this one was going to be awful.

BUT - it went surprisingly well for me, aka i didn’t break down in tears or break everything. I went in almost certain I would fail, which is such an awful way to go about things, but it didn’t mean I didn’t try my best. I was surprised at how I managed to get the camera and half of the lights up in around 10 minutes, even if I did put the camera on the wrong way to begin with. I had spent a lot of time looking over the basic notes on how to calibrate the monitor and viewfinder that I don’t feel I done enough work on the lights.

When I choose my lights, I’ll be honest, I was so nervous I just took whatever I thought I had seen before and would manage to lift with my pathetic arms; not the best way to go about it.
First, I calibrated the monitor and viewfinder, with a few glitches that needed to be sorted but I was assured I didn’t fail purely on that, (hurrah!) and then sorted the timecode. I was a little confused by the timecode leading up to the assessment, however a tutorial with Ray the day before sorted out my issues. For some reason I thought it was going to be really complex, hard stuff, but it turned out to be relatively easy! I hope I didn’t make any stupid mistake, an easy thing for me to do under pressure.

However, after I got that all sorted out, I moved on to the lights. I done the white balance which was easy enough, then moved on to back focus. I really don’t like back focus under pressure, I just couldn’t get it right for what felt like soo long! I eventually managed to get it and swiftly moved on to my lights.
I of course managed to do a few ridiculously stupid mistakes I.e. think that the extension cable was plugged in when it actually WASN’T and ran around thinking the lights had broke for a few short moments, but that was no biggie. The lights didn’t shatter and break, so I was quite relieved at that. I set up the lights in a classic 3 point lighting structure, and wanted to go for quite heavy shadows, so didn’t use any gels or NDs on the Backlight. I did use an ND on my fill light to soften it up a bit, and had the backlight quite close to the mannequin. Because I was in a bit of a rush, I’m sure I could have done it better and more thought out if i didn’t panic as much, but I managed to use my time wisely and thats a positive. I then recorded two (very short) clips of my set up, and quickly ran around trying to tidy everything away in time.

Overall, I think we were around 3 minutes over (?) which isn’t great but it isn’t too bad, after all, the lights were super hot and the cables were super long! In general, I feel I could have put more thought in to the lights I was using, however under the circumstances I am quite pleased for a first attempt and have managed to come out of my first summative assessment still alive and well, thank you for your concern!