PREPARATION VS. IMPROVISATION

I feel that when it comes to whether I perform best when I am prepared or when I improvise is a 50-50. I am a lot calmer and feel more in control if I am well prepared. I guess that is natural for everyone. If a shot is planned out then I feel safe and confortable doing it, as there is thought behind it and it is nice to have less to think about. However this can lead to me also freaking out a bit, if everything is planned really specifically and for some unforeseen reason it does not go as planned, improvisation is really important.

 

If I have no plan and go into a shot planning on winging it, and improvising the whole thing if find that some really cool stuff, often more interesting than the planned shots, can come out of it. However I often feel like it takes far longer, because it’s not as if there is not planning at all, the planning just kind of happens in the moment, which can often make a shoot drag out for an extremely long time.

 

This is why I think it is important for me to be well planned for my shoot, however not so planned that it restricts me from improvising on the day. I guess I could almost say in my plan I need to organize time to improvise so I am not blocking off any interesting work.

 

REST OF SEMESTER: Practice doing a planned out shoot as well as fully improvised and then do one to try and create a good medium.

GAIN CONFIDENCE

In order to be able to proceed with the idea of working by myself, I will first have to gain more confidence in doing this. It’s a nice sentiment to say I will do my scene by myself so I trust my ideas and grow as a filmmaker; however if I go into it without practicing I feel like it can only end badly, with me second guessing myself and being overwhelmed. Having acted in things before, the number one thing that causes me to not perform well is having a director who second guesses him or herself and is not confident in what they are doing or the decisions they are making.

 

In order to avoid this I need to go out by myself, potentially without actors to begin with, and get used to trusting my instincts and myself.

 

Doing this will also clear up exact things I need to work on myself, it will help me discover what I am good at and what needs work. For example I could be very good at framing but horrible at tracking. At this point in time I don’t know enough about my own abilities to be able to decide what I will include in my final scene.

 

REST OF SEMESTER: Practice working by myself

RETHINKING WHY I LIKE WORKING WITH PEOPLE

Looking back on my working with other idea I have realized another reason why I think I work with others so much. I think it is because I do not trust myself to make decisions and often think that my ideas are subpar.

 

I think that this is something that is really holding me back in being able to contribute my to the community of film. I found that when I was shooting something in class, I kept asking everyone if they thought it was okay, in my previous post, and when I was in class, I looked at this as getting ideas from others and working collaboratively; reflection on it now I have realized that it may if fact be a lack in confidence in my own ideas and abilities. This has caused me to consider working by myself for my final scene in order to challenge myself and to make myself trust in and rely on my ideas and choices.

 

Doing this would allow me to grow much more and therefore be able to contribute more to the group and collaborative situations that I do love working in.

 

REST OF SEMESTER: Consider working by myself

HOW I WORK BEST

I often find that I work best with lost of people around. I like feeding off other people’s ideas and energy. I have always found that I am a good collaborative worker. This is why I think I will work with people on my scene. Whether it is people from our class, or friends who are willing to give up some time to help me out, I like having support and bouncing ideas off each other. I find that my best work is when I have a network of people around me.

 

In the class exercises I have found that I like the bigger groups, however that relies on working with people who mesh well together. Sometimes in class when we have bigger groups I find that ideas can clash if clear roles are not assigned. This is why I would have to pick whom I work well with and have clear roles that people stick to. As I said I like the idea of bouncing ideas off each other, but this can lead to a ‘too many cooks spoils the broth’ situation. I think that clear role definitions stop this situation from occurring.

REST OF SEMESTER: Find people I work well with.

SOMETHING AESTHETIC

Not being extremely experienced with the camera, for my final scene I want to make something technically well executed, in terms of exposure, lighting, focus, white balance etc. I would like to try and do things that I have not been able to master before, for example shifting focus. To do this I will need to practice a lot with the camera. At the moment I can get a good shot if I have the sheet of instructions next to me reminding me how to make a good shot. By the time I shoot my scene I want this to become second nature.

 

Firstly I will need to decide what kind of camera I will want to use. It is a good opportunity to get a good understanding of a camera I am not very good with. Probably the ones we have been using in class, I haven’t had much of a change to work much with them.

 

Secondly I will need to decide in what kind of environment I want to shoot and practice in that environment. Perhaps I will practice in a variation of environments and pick which one I work best in – I think that that is the best way to go. There is no harm in trying out lost of places, it just means more experience.

Having a few days to plan and think about the scene we made on our own time helped me a lot. Event though I wasn’t really sitting down and planning out exactly how I was going to shoot and edit it, just thinking about it when walking to uni, or on the tram on the way to work, ideas came to me that wouldn’t have had I not had this time. This did not exactly mean that my shooting was better than it would have been had we done this exercise in with a time pressure, it merely means I prompted myself to do something different than your average basic shots to cover the scene.

 

In the end I was annoyed at myself with this scene. I ended up trying something a bit different with half of the scene but didn’t commit to it fully. In the end the idea I had was a long single shot shifting point of view throughout the scene (wanting to try out some ideas I had come up with through my methodology posts). I wasn’t 100% sure about the idea so decided to try and shoot both my interesting idea and a basic set up just in case I didn’t like my original idea. This lead to be doing a half assed job on both ideas and having to make a weird mix of them both in my final edit as neither had a full scene in them. Thinking back I wish I had backed my idea more and committed to it fully, even if it had of been a massive fail, at least I would have learnt more from it than just being disappointed with my end edit.

The major thing I took out of this week’s shooting exercise is DON’T BE LATE FOR CLASS. I have a very bad habit of running late to classes; this seems to always land me with the acting roles. Having done a lot of acting in the past I am never fazed or fused with being the actor, however I have realized that it is stopping me from learning as much as I could. I think it is important for everyone to have a go acting, to see what it is like to be directed, however I feel as though I am dropping behind in experiencing the behind the camera work. I don’t think that I am confident enough in any of the roles, I feel I am competent, but I am still not confident, and I am realizing that these weekly exercises are exactly what I should be doing to get my confidence and knowledge to the level it should be at.

 

The biggest thing I did notice when shooting in class was the vast difference moving the camera even a millimeter can make, especially when filming in a room, such as the class room, with such strong lines and colors. It can change the whole dynamic of a scene, just by moving a phone into the shot, or tightening the shot in to exclude some of the white wall, the shot can become so much more powerful. These slight movements bring in interesting lines and get rid of wasted or boring space that can distract from the scene on a whole.

Watching the performances in the Door and Stairs edits was very interesting, in particular watching the difference of my personal performance of the same character in two different interpretations of the scene. In the first interpretation, the more abstract and less conventional interpretation, my performance was wooden and did not aid the scene in any way. A major part of a scene’s, and film’s, effectiveness is the acting and if this is bad or not suited to the scene or film in someway it can upset the whole thing. I feel like this was the outcome of my performance in the first interpretation of Doors.

 

I somehow was roped into acting in both interpretations of the scene, within the executive group I was in, I was meant to act as the character Van, when I was meant to be one of the support roles, the whole executive group did not turn up, so I was the obvious choice to fill in for them.

 

The second interpretation of the scene, the one in which I was originally acting in, my performance was miles better. I am not saying that is was great, or anything close to the performances that can make a film, but it was heaps better than my first attempt. On reflection I think that this could have been caused by one of these reasons, or a perhaps a combination of them all:

 

1. Practice

The Second time I did it, I knew the lines so had less to think about, and I had already been on camera for the other one so I was used to people watching me ‘act’ so felt more comfortable.

2. Interpretations

The second interpretation was far more straightforward so the actions and things I was instructed to do were simple and made sense.

3. Understanding what was going on

The fact that the second interpretation was the one that I was in the executive group for I think was a major role in my performance being better. I was knew what was going to happen before I had to do it, I was ‘in the know’ so this made things easier on me.

4. Clear direction

The direction that I was given was a lot clearer in the second interpretation. I feel that the group was more cohesive and had their roles more clearly defined than the first, this meant that there was one clear objective; this made it a calm and easy environment to work in.

Shooting in class with the big groups was really interesting! I found it worked a lot better than the pervious shoots we have done. I think a major factor in this would be that these shoots were a lot more organized than the previous one; just the fact that people had set roles was good. At first when we were told we would be in groups of ten, I thought that it would be tough and that it would also be a bit chaotic. One of the great things about our class is that everyone is very keen to be involved and everyone has great ideas, but this has often caused a bit of ‘too many cooks spoils the broth’. This shoot actually worked really well, the fact there was some kind of order to who called the shots as well as people there to keep us on time and on track caused our shoot to run really smoothly. This obviously reflects how things need to work on a real film shoot on location. It will be really interesting to see all the different cuts that come out of the shoot, while it was a group effort, overall it was Natalie’s shot design and Chris’ directing that guided how the shoot turned out, I am interested in seeing the other group members’ cut and their ideas of the scene.

There is an idea that I heard saying that every story line has been told in all the film that have been created in the past and therefore the only original stories to tell are futuristic. I don’t know true this is, however it has caused me to me to consider the importance of originality when it comes to filmmaking. It is what makes the audience engage with the film that they are watching. This originality doesn’t need to be a new story line, or a new genre, if you are creating a film that is similar to one that have been created before, it is important to put your own touch on it. I think that the most exciting way this can be done is through an innovative and creative way of shooting the film. The work we have been doing in the scene has shown me that the simplest of camera moves, or shot angels that have come up in class through experimentation, are the things that could make the difference between ‘another main stream Hollywood film’ and a new and exciting film that has not been seen before. This is an exciting thing to be thinking about while researching through practice in class.