For this shooting exercise, I tried for two times. The first time is not good. Something wrong with framing and angel. I didn’t get the shots I want exactly. One time I was talking to Lisa about my exercise. She gave me some advices on it which sparks me. The problem of my first work is that the framing is too wide and the angle is not good enough to emphasize the action. What I did in the second try is to tight frame up and find a good angle that emphasize the action.
In this exercise there are only four shots from different angles. The first one, a close up shot from side, Phoebe is taking things out from/into her purse. The action is very well seen, and the depth of field of the objects on the desk is right on spot, blurry in the front, clear at the background. The second one, a wide shot from above Phoebe’s head, this shot looks wide, but it emphasizes the action very well and artfully. In the framing, there are only the desk full of objects poured from the purse and Phoebe. Although it is wide, it is still tight and neat. The reason I say it emphasize the action is that audience now can be more sure that Phoebe is putting her purse away. The third one, a close up shot of Phoebe’s hand searching the purse. It clearly emphasizes on action. The last one, a wide shot of sitting room with Phoebe sitting in it. In this shot, I intend to use a wide shot to show the living environment of character. Also the emphasized actions shows the character’s personality and emotion in some degree.
The problem I ran into in this exercise is the lighting. Some of the footages I got is over exposed, also the entire lighting tends to be yellow, the color of the sitting room lights. What I need to remember is that to check exposure with zebra pattern and do the white balance before shooting. Later when editing, I used the tools in color correction, fast color corrector and RGB color corrector to help with the lighting, it turns out to be ok.
Auteur critic is not a rigid formula, but an art requires extraordinary intelligence, discrimination and taste. A critic who has none of these qualities may fail in perceiving what is original and important in new work and helping others to see.
‘The Outer Circle’-The Technical Competence
The technical competence is the most outer circle. This means it is the least important for a director. A good direct is being able to achieve his/her own personal expression and style. To create a new standard is very helpful and worthy for a director because the standard of technical competence are based on comparisons with work already done. Sometimes the good use of technical competence can even redeem the weakness of the material.
The unsuccessful movies of a director is always more noticeable than the good ones. The audience are most aware of the personality of the director are his worst film. After few films are done, the personality of the director is like the label of clothes, audience judges it from the personality.
‘The Inner Circle’-Interior Meaning
The inner circle is the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. Interior meaning is extrapolated form the tension between a director’s personality and his material. The inner circle is the place that keeps secrets and is full of mystique.
‘Outside the Circle’-What is a Film Critic?
A critic is an important role to help people go deeply in the work. People can understand more about the work with the help of a critic. The art of the critic is to transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others. There is no fixed theory of judging a movie. The desire for a theory that will solve all the riddles of creativity is in itself perhaps an indication of their narrowness and confusion. Criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply, and that film criticism is particularly exciting just because of the multiplicity of elements in film art.
Getting dressed is another scene I made. I shot for two times and edited for three time for this scene. I shoot my friend Phoebe who is playing me in the scene wearing three different costumes. The clothes are mine, I ask Phoebe to wear them, and imagine herself is looking at the mirror.
When shooting, I was looking for different angles and framings. I kept some of the footages where Phoebe failed the acting. The reason I kept them is because it looks very natural. At first, I shoot two different costumes. They are two different styles. I shoot again later and added another costumes just to make it look more visual.
When editing, firstly I just simply cut the the two costumes. Then Paul suggested to cut back and forth between two costumes. And also cut down the duration of the scene to around 30 seconds. Cutting back and forth is a good idea, it is also actually in my mind. It can make the scene more visual to audience. The changing between two costumes will also make it less boring to watch. When it comes to time duration, at first I didn’t realize that it is too long. When I showed it to Phoebe, she said that she gets a bit boring to watch it at the end because it feels like too many repeating. Then I looked through it again and again, there are indeed some repeating in it, and this is not what audience wants. So I cut it down to 30 seconds the second time. It was much better, briefer and clearer. One thing I learned about editing in this is that cut tersely, give audience what they want to see and do not miss the key points, avoid repeating as much as possible. Also, learn to cut through the moments. There is not a beginning or ending of a moment. For example, when cutting, there is not need to cut right from ‘action’ to ‘cut’. You can just cut from ‘she is washing hands’ instead of ‘she is going to wash hands’, audience will get the message.
For the second time shooting of ‘getting dressed’, I used the ‘DE DO’ KIT to get some good lighting. It turned out to be a failure. During the shooting, I used all of the three lights. I was trying to apply the background light, fill light and key light theory into my practice. The problem I ran into is the overlap and nonuniform of lights. Finally it was too bright and too dark. So after few time of practices, I gave up. The other thing I might did wrong is to shut all of the curtains to avoid the sun lights. Finally I just shoot in natural day lights, it was ok. When I later talked to my classmate, Lisa. She said that Robin said if you don’t have much experience using DEDO KIT, you should start with using just one light. It is actually complicated to use three lights at the same time. For this, I decided to do some research about it, I will come up with another research post of three-point lighting.
For the audio of this one, I decide to use voice-over of me mumbling and whistling. The idea just jumped into my mind. And I really like the idea because what I’ve made is very personal and causal, so it totally fits. Because of doing one assessment in sound design, I found that we can record sound directly through quicktime player and the microphone down in edit suit. This made things much more convenient. When recording, I was too close to the microphone, so there is some buzz sound. To avoid that, to wrap some tissue and to be a bit further from the microphone are good ideas.
In this week’s class, we went through some lighting techniques. Paul introduced DEDO KIT to us. There are three lights in it, there are also different colors of filters we can use. In lighting, there are three main lights, key light, background light and fill light. In the class, all of us worked like a crew to finish one short scene, ‘look at Aidan’. It was a simple scene, but we spend the whole class working on it just to get everything right and good enough. Everyone got some practice and gained experience from it. First we set up cameras, adjust audio, connect to audio kits and boom. Then we did the white balance, exposure and focal length on camera. When everything is ready, The assistant is calling the shots, as I remembered, it was something like audio set, camera rolling, slice in, frame, slice out, and then director calls annnnd action. Secondly we use the lights equipment, the key light is hanged over Aidan’s head, the background light is placed behind Aidan, the fill light is a white reflector some one holding and standing at the side of Aidan. when the lighting was all set, we can see a soft wrapping lights and a clear glaze side of Aidan’s face from camera lens. The lighting was good, next thing was about camera movement and construction. When we took the first shot, the camera coverage is quite wide and loose. The movement is bit slower than the action. After Paul suggest to make the frame tighter and ask the actors to slow down a bit, the shot improved a lot. We spend the whole class to finish this one simple scene, this makes me understand the importance of a scene with good quality. There are always areas that we can improve in one scene. So keep digging and improving.
When I was shooting this one, I shot it using my Canon 700D. The audio was actually really good, but I found limitation of focal length. As the first scene I made this semester, it turned out to be ok. As I said in my presentation, I am going to shoot some ordinary events like this for my project. Also I will be focusing on actions. So for my exercise, I choose to shoot with a tight framing. There are lots of close-ups in my exercise. I am try to find a way to express a person’s emotion, personality, the environment she is in through these close-up shots.
In this scene, we can see some blurry background of the kitchen counter and sitting room. I intend to cover this in the framing to show the living environment of the character. One thing that actually surprised me is the audio. Firstly the quality is really good. Secondly it creates the atmosphere-when I was recording, I forget to turn off the radio, so it record the singing from the radio as well. It sounds really nice, singing in distance. However when you try to put some music when editing, it is different. As I am trying to combine documentary and drama elements in my work, the ‘plain recording’ sometimes is what I need.
When I was at school last week sometime, I found an interesting clip displayed in loop in a small screen on the floor. It looks like a short documentary of taking seeds out of a watermelon. What makes me feel interesting is that the special way of presenting this. The director treated the watermelon as a patient obviously. Firstly the framing is quite tight, audience can only see the a very tiny bit of the watermelon, from the colour and texture, audience know it is a watermelon. What is quite creative about this is that the director put a surgical gown on the watermelon. Also there are two hands there, one is operating, the other one is passing the operation tools. They both are wearing operation gloves. In addition, there is the sound of beeping like the sound from medical equipment all the way. The way of cutting the watermelon is very well-designed, it looks exactly like they are performing an operation on an patient, the watermelon. The fruit meat is so red and it looks quite juicy as well, it makes audiences feel that it is bleeding and suffering. I just want to say, how creative it is to make this all anthropopathic, detailed and sensitive. It totally works out well!
In the Heat of the Sun is a film I recently watched and am inspired by it a lot. It is an old Chinese film shoot in 1994. It tells the story of a group of teenagers in cultural revolution in China from 1960s to 1970s. After I watched this film, few words just jump into my mind, time, diachronic, beautiful, clean, sunny, funny, bright, visual feast, exquisite… The cinematography and shots construction are the things I admire and want to learn from.
Here are the several scenes I select from the film and I will analysis their cinematography and shots constructions. I can’t download the film, so I can’t cut the scenes. I will provide the time period and the whole film at the end. (I found the film on Youtube)
12:20-14:50
In this scene, Xiaobing(the boy, leading character) makes a key by himself and opens his parents’ draw, he finds a condom there, but he doesn’t know it’s a condom, he thinks it’s a balloon or something then he blows it and plays it around.
In this scene there are lots of tight framing where the ‘balloon’ flies around all over the apartment, audience can see the whole perspective of the apartment, the wedding picture of his parents, the handiwork displayed in the apartment. All of those things appear in the framing show the style and social appearance of China at that time. I just want to say that it looks so real and stylish. also there is one shoot where Xiaobing is opening the lock on the draw, once he opened it, camera pan and tilt up immediately and become stable when the framing is planform of the all of the stuff in the draw, then followed by a over-shoulder shot of Xiaobing. This shot is so dynamic and shows the most of Xiaobing’s curiosity.
31:49-33:06
In this scene, Xiaobing makes another key and get into a girl’s apartment. But he doesn’t expect that the girl comes home suddenly, so he hides under the bed and watches the girl changing clothes. The framing is from Xiaobing’s position of view, so we can only see the girl’s half legs. But we can still see some parts of her from the mirror. I really like the direction here, even though we can only see some part of the girl, but we are curious as Xiaobing. From her body language, I think that she is a really beautiful, cute and young girl, she must love smiling and has a good personality.
46:42-50:13
In this scene, Xiaojun run into the girl he likes and he goes up and talks to her. I really like the shoot construction when the girls walks pass by Xiaobing. I have some pictures blew will show it.
The location is very well chosen, as we can see from the pictures, they are walking through a path surrounded by tall green trees. There is also a short wall on the other side. It feels like a summer afternoon with a very gentle breeze. Everything is so bright and beautiful.It’s like palpitating… They are talking on this path, they walk, stop, she walks, he chases, she stops again and call him, he goes up again… The subtle relationship between them starts building…
1:40:47-1:43:00
In this scene, there is one extreme close-up and tilt-up shot of the girl’s body, she is wearing a red tight swimming suit. Again it is from the visual position of view of Xiaojun. This shot comes out really great, it reflect the psychology of the youth in not so open-minded environment. They are curious, palpitating, wondering, happy, blundering, violent, immature, sad, uneducated, arrogant…they want to try something out, experience different stuff. But all of this is beautiful.
2:00:25-2:03:36
This is the last scene in the film which I like the most. In this scene, Xiaojun who can’t swim goes up to the highest diving tower and jumps into the swimming pool. He tries a lot. When he is climbing the stairs, camera shoot from lots of angles, those special angles makes audience feel the scare and confusion deep in Xiaojun’s heart.
In Friday’s class, we did the presentation, it comes out great, everyone has their own thoughts and perspectives about making films, documentary, drama or both. based on the feedback that three tutors gave me, I have a more specific and deeper understanding about what I’m going to do and achieve in the rest of the semester. I am excited about making all this happen. As Paul said, there isn’t have to be a short film at the end, it can be like 20 shooting practices. However this semester I want to be ambitious about my work, I want it to be a short film with everything considered and done well. I want it to be one of works not just some exercise and practices. As Robin said, mine idea is a self-portrait with an actor. Some one else is playing me. And Paul talked about the voice-over I will create. For now, the content of voice is kind of abstract for me, I haven’t thought of some good ones. One thing I am sure about it is that it will appear in my short film all the way, it comes and goes but never stops until the end.
When listen to other classmates’ presentation, I was sparked by some concepts, different perspectives, new ideas… I list some
-close-up montage
there will be lots of close-ups in my film, what I am thinking is to mix up and put all those close-ups in different scenes together, to make a connection, communication of those different events. It is actually related as well. Then I can have another separated montage scene.
-collection of people wearing interesting stuff
I’m always into costumes and clothes. What I can do in my film is to ask my actor to get dressed in different style and kinds of clothes like a nice dress, something causal-T-shirt and jeans, pajamas, high heels, sports shoes, slippers, barefoot… then I can take photos, or record still images of her in different clothes. And how she acts and feels is all up to her. All I do is to record all of this.
-nature
when some one talked about surfing and showed the images of seas and with people in it. It is really beautiful and makes me feel the connection between people and nature. It just kind of reminds me the connections between people’s emotion and the natural landscape. It’s the thing I always want to try out. Just imagine this, an extreme close up of the sea wave connects to an extreme close up of a person’s face, with eyes close, quite and peaceful, thinking something, cuts to sea wave, cut back to the person’s face, suddenly she is frowning and with her eyes wide open. Something like this is what I want to try out.
I am going to shoot several scenes of daily routine of a person’s life, a girl. I will focus on the specific, small, detailed and ordinary life events, for example (the events I have in mind) getting dressed, putting on or take off make ups, getting up in the morning… I want to create mysterious atmosphere, so I will find different framing and angles to show some parts of the girl but not her face (can be a blurry one). In my shooting, there must be direction, performance and staging. I want to show the power of the real moment- it may not look that bright and wonderful from outside, but the beauty of it is that it’s real and ordinary. There can be the authentic of documentary, there can be exquisite of drama, there can be both. For me, I am trying to create something real and beautiful, I want to show the power of real using good cinematography. CINEMATOGRAPHY is the thing I want to work on this semester.
Location
For the location, I will shoot in my best friend’s apartment. There would be kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom and balcony. I am trying to capture something causal and daily, however there is still staging in it. I will move some stuff around and make it look good in the framing. To get ideas of framing and camera movements, one thing I can do about location is to take picture of them, frame it up with my phone. When I look at the pictures later, I may get some sparks about framing, lighting, angle, mise-en-scene… When I get more familiar with the locations, I will be more flexible with all kinds of camera movements at this place.
Camera movement
I will use both tripod and hand-held. Tripod is more stable which is more suitable for still shoots. Hand-held is more flexible which is more suitable for different angles and compositions of shoots. I think I will use handheld more because I am trying to find interesting and tight framing and angles, hand-held can give me big room of moving camera around.
Lighting
As Paul suggested, I will use different lightings in different scenes to create different atmosphere. At the same time I can learn more about lighting. Once I read that all of the natural lighting you see in cinema is not natural. So for lighting research, I need to borrow some lights or reflectors from uni or use some lamps.
Editing
When editing, I want to try different filters on different scenes, the same as lighting, try to create the atmosphere. This is just a thought. Also I want to add a voice over, some music, also I will keep the original sounds appear in shooting. The voice over can be something creative, related or not related to my shooting. And the music plays when still shoots come.
Casting and directing
I am going to work with my best friend Phoebe who knows me very well. In the scene, she is acting me. I will communicate with her also I will be directing her when shooting. I think that it is easier for her to understand my direction and what I want to get out of the shooting based on the closeness and good communication between us.
