Curriculum Guides
Lighting Curriculum
The second half of the FilmSkills Cinematography Curriculum covers lighting. We partnered with Arri, Kino-Flo, LEDGO, and Matthews Studio Equipment to produce an immersive series of lighting tutorials designed to expose students to the equipment, tools, and techniques used on professional sets.
The lighting curriculum is divided into sections:
- Lighting Tools – Covers the types of lighting equipment, when, and how to use them
- Core Techniques – Covers foundational techniques for creating, shaping, and softening light
- Grip and Rigging – We take students through every stand, clamp, and rig and teach them industry best practices to safely rig a light
- Exposure Techniques – Covers techniques for achieving the desired exposure – note that this series of lessons also works with the camera and lens curriculum
- Lighting Techniques– covers basic lighting from lighting people to green screen
- Safety training – While the entire Safety Training series is 14 lessons, the 5 lessons that relate directly to lighting and grip have been added to this curriculum
- Crew – Covers the hierarchy, duties, and responsibilities of the grip and electric crew
- Lighting Demos – We take all the skills from the lighting curriculum and apply them in non on-set demos, with each demo highlighting solutions to common on set challenges
Learning Objectives
Our approach is driven from an industry best-practices view. By combining on-set demonstrations to help students visualize complex concepts with experiential guidance from working Hollywood cinematographers, students gain a complete view of the physics of cinematography, the tools and techniques, and the application to real-world environments and how that application affects the emotional context of each shot.
About the Lessons
Every box in the curriculum outline below is a self-contained lesson, complete with a 20-30 minute long on-set video tutorial, test questions, projects and exercises, and downloadable resources to enhance the lesson.
Lessons can be mixed and matched to create a custom learning path in each class, and while the curriculum below is our recommendation as the content producers, you can select any lessons you wish when building each class, including lessons from other categories.
Download the Complete Curriculum Catalog
The catalog features complete descriptions and video durations for every FilmSkills Academic lesson. You can look up each lesson from the curriculum flow chart below for more information.
