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New Showlight Speakers Class of 2025 video releases available

Showlight has released two new Speaker Videos from its Class of 2025 who graced the stage in Dijon, France: Roger Simonsz BSC - “Schrödinger’s dimmer; controlling the uncontrollable”; and Peter Macdonald BSC, DGA, DGGB - “A Life in Cinema with Peter Macdonald”.

Simonsz, a graduate, and now fellow, of Rose Bruford college, has been part of Showlight since 2005. In a career that has taken him to thirty different countries - sometimes working in languages he didn’t understand - his award-winning work as a lighting designer, cinematographer, writer and director in many different genres has been seen on stage and screens across the world.

Of his presentation on working with light outdoors, he says: “It’s very difficult in film to do the kind of slow lighting changes we do so easily in theatre. Using examples from ‘Engrenages/Spiral’ as well as ‘Piper’, we will explore how to achieve control on location, in daylight, while cueing the sun, with the help of Schrödinger’s dimmer.”

Born in the Netherlands, Simonsz began his career in the UK and now resides in France. He has recently finished working on a new feature film in the south of France, “Les Voix Colorées”.

Multi award-winning industry veteran Peter Macdonald brought Showlight 2025 to a close with an informal chat in which he shared memories and anecdotes from his life in cinema spanning more than seventy years. 

He has worked with director Sir Laurence Olivier on four films as camera operator and got his break on the 1958 film “A Night to Remember” with cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, with whom he collaborated for the next 25 years as his camera operator (“Cabaret”, “Superman I & II”, “A Bridge Too Far”, “Cromwell”, “Excalibur”, “Murder on the Orient Express”) and with David Watkin (“Yentl”). 

Macdonald evolved into a second unit director (“Batman 1 & 4”, “Empire Strikes Back”, the first four “Harry Potters”, “Guardians of the Galaxy”, “Wolverine”, “The Bourne Ultimatum”), and then cinematographer, director and producer. 

Today, Macdonald reads a lot of scripts, works as advisor and consultant, producer and executive producer in the U.S., and participates on film festival juries in Europe where he mentors young filmmakers. He is President of Le Rex, his local cinema in Veules les Roses, Normandy.

Macdonald and his wife, Madelyn Most, work with the Art Without Limit Film Festival for children and young adults with special needs, physical and mental disabilities/ handicaps and autism.

The new videos are part of a series of periodic releases, with more Speaker presentation videos going live as we move towards the next Showlight. They can be viewed at https://www.showlight.org/videos.

(Photos: Sebastian Dewsbery/Jean Nguyen/Showlight)

www.showlight.org

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