Lighting at Arri

My last little course has been Practical Lighting Operations over at Arri GB in Uxbridge.
The Arri site was huge with so many toys and we were spoilt rotten.
We were taught by a gentleman named David Lock who is a lighting director and has done things like Eastenders as well as a huge variety of tv shows for the BBC, he's now a freelancer.
There was a total of 5 of us on the course and someone taking photos of us (if I ever see the pics online i'll update this post). Together we were shown a variety of different equipment, grips, lights, reflectors, gels, scrim.. there was a huge amount of stuff at our disposal.
We began with a simple 3 point lighting excercise but went really indepth. We were shown how to light a person well, picking out the better features, how to straighten a wonky nose and to favor the better side of the face (avoid the fat side), how to make the face thinner or fatter using light, all sorts of little tricks and techniques to get it just right.
We also looked at lighting more than one person at a time, lighting two people in the classroom and doing diagrams for more than two. We learnt a couple of tricks and cheats to get round various issues in a studio atmosphere but i'll be keeping them to myself for now.

We went on to do a walk through scenario thing where we had to film David walking down the side of the arri building, into the lobby, then into a darkened room and then cut to him sat in front of a window in his office. During this excercise we created out own sun, learnt how to use the real sun to bounce light to where we needed using reflectors, learnt that 2stop scrim is amazing stuff. Most importantly though we learnt the finer points that I may not have considered before this, it was the directions of the shadows, being consistent with the source of light, making a place look sunnier by casting the right type of shadows on the wall etc..
It was all adout picking up on the fine details so that a shot is lit so as no one would notice the lighting as the brain felt comfortable with it (if that makes sense)

there was probably more we learnt but i think its all just soaked in and i am eager to put it all into practice rather than write about it. So off I go to play with lights, cameras and editing stuff!