Camera & Lighting Assessment

I was so scared before going into the assessment on Tuesday. Not because I did not know what to do, but just of the time limit i had to do it in.
Me and Ada were doing it at the same time time - so at least I wasn't alone. We both went in at the start and got told what we had to do and where all the equitment were.
The clock had started and we only had an hour to set up the camera and light a manicin that was standing in the middle of the room.
I quickly rushed over to the camera equitment and took it over where i started taking it out. I felt i was really comfortable doing this part and managed to get the tripod and camera up in no time at all. I then plugged in the monitor and starting cofiguring it. I sometimes get stuck on this as to which bits i have to line up with each other, but overall i thought i did okay and only needed some of Rays help. But after Ray had shown me how to do this I realised I had been matching the wrong collumns up, and was easily fixable for next time. I then went on to doing this viewfinder. I have always found this hard for some reason and can never get the contrast or brightness right. When Ray came over to check, he explained what was wrong and changed it to show me so I knew how to do it in future. I then did backfocus which I have also been struggling on but with Rays tutorial made everything much clearer. The last thing to do on the camera was the timecode and to do bars, and i easily did this as i freshened up my memory the day before in a tutorial with Ray.
After all the camera stuff was done I moved on to the lighting, I rigged up the lights and started working on how I was going to light the manican. I used the key light on the right hand side of the camera. I then placed the fill light on the opposite side with 2 diffs over the top to make the light less bright. And finally placed the backlight opposite the key light shining over the manicans head with 2 diffs also, so that the key light was the most bright.
When Ray came over to check he told me my brightness was far too bright and was deleting all my detail on the manican, but when turning this down it solved all the problems and my manican was successfully lit. I then shot the lighted scene twice.
By this stage there was only 10 mins to derig - so quickly had to put everything away. I managed to do this only 2 mins after the time which i was quite pleased about as i was worrying so much i was going to be way over this.
Overall i thought my performance was quite good, and have learned a lot by doing the camera and lighting by myself.