During the Monday’s class, I learned how to adjust the brightness and contrast of the view finder, to set the correct white balance and the useful function of “zebra” and “bars”. Colour has temperature. There is the warm Tungsten light of 3200k, and the cold day light of 5600k. I’ve never really looked into the numbers before this class but now I realise that I should do some research on all those settings that I don’t understand on cameras. And I also never knew that changing the ISO isn’t actually changing the sensitivity to light. It’s changing the gain. (So that’s why the picture will be noisier with a high ISO.)
On Wednesday, we got into audio recording, learnt a bit about the settings on the camera, quite simple to understand at this level. Also, the lighting is always important and difficult to control in films and photographs. One of the elements is the quality of light: Is it hard or soft?
For the first individual exercise I did outside the class, the first thing I learn is that filmmaking is both a creative job and a manual labor—the camera and tripod were so heavy! There has been construction team doing their work on campus, so I decided to film them. I find them interesting because the heavy machines really mark our age after the industrial revolution. That was when human development started to boost than ever before. I first chose a low angle, wide shot. It looked nice, but after I finished setting up, the machine stopped working for a while so there weren’t much action in the shot. Then I went closer to capture a medium long shot of the excavator. I was lucky to have caught a full action and a worker’s dancing in my clip. I think the dance can symbolise the optimistic attitude towards the world. After the exercise, I got more familiar with the camera so hopefully the setting-up will take shorter time for me in the future. The result was a bit different from what I want. The main difference was the action for the first take. It was unexpected. The dance was also unexpected, but I rather like the change for adding a bit of humanism in my shot. Overall, I think no matter how we are well-prepared, there will always be the unexpected. The only thing I can do is to try to expect the unexpected and make plan B or C in advance.
Jialu Cheng
