After completing the first class exercise I learnt three major things:

  1. At uni, you gotta film what you want as quickly as you can.
  2. Lighting is KEY.
  3. What you intend to film, is often the least interesting.

Get in and Get out: When completing exercises at university, the vibe seems to be get in and get out as quickly as you can. Everyone’s kinda half interested and they’re all waiting to film their own shots. So you have to get pretty good at just taking charge and being like “you, your here, and this is your line”, you, you need to adjust the tripod to here”. Otherwise people kind just stand around looking at their phones or goofing off.

Lighting is KEY: Whilst filming the first class exercise I didn’t pay that much attention to the lighting, but once reviewing the footage I realised the lighting was pretty whack. The footage had this yellowy hue to it, and the room itself was pretty dim. Which meant the colours were all distorted and the shots looked pretty muddied. I ended up resolving this by exchanging the whites for purple, which gave the footage this weird, abstract, graphic feel to it, which made the footage a lot more visually engaging.

Keep shooting: Once reviewing my footage I realised that all the ‘coolest’ shit I shot was the result of just leaving the camera rolling, when it wasn’t meant to be. This footage ended up being much more engaging, and ‘real’ than any of the footage that had been planned out. Obviously this wouldn’t work in all scenarios, but when your able to be more abstract and experimental this accidental footage can be a sweet surprise.

 

After completing the Homework I realised two major things:

  1. I overshoot everything
  2. Some of the shit I shot was boring af

Overshooting: After reviewing the footage from my first homework exercise and trying to assemble it in Premiere Pro, I realised I had about  5 minutes worth of footage for a 30 second clip. Overshooting is a bad problem, because it wastes a lot of time, eats up space on your hard rive and encourages you to include footage in projects, that should never have been in there.

Boring footage: Is also a major problem. I realised after trying to assemble my first homework exercise in Premiere Pro that the majority of what I had shot, was extremely boring and disengaging. What objectively seemed like a great concept, turned out to be extremely visually uninteresting. This is where overshooting and boring footage intersect, because if the project had of been more planned out then neither problem would occur. Creating engaging content seems dependant on having planned the BEST way to shoot, whatever it is you are shooting. Otherwise you just end up with a lot of average shots, that weren’t well thought out.

 

Until next time,

Louise Alice Wilson