Soo Wei Yun's Blog

The Bank – photo credits: Kerri ! 🙂

On Monday, 5th October, STeve members travelled to Bianca’s place to shoot some on location scenes. We took a long forty-five minute tram ride to Preston on a hot, sunny day (that’s not… important at all…). On that afternoon, we shot the slasher horror, mockumentary and drama all in one day. It was definitely our most productive shoot to date.

We continued filming extra scenes for the Mockumentary because we felt quite interested in the progress of creating a mock documentary series. However, it is still under consideration because of our other genre scenes we shot.

There was not much preparation of the script as we ended up adding more ideas along the way. I really liked the style of process due to the fact that we kept adding more interesting ideas instead of being constrained to the ideas we put on paper and shoot accordingly to what was written. The improvisation had made it more realistic for the mockumentary as they were placed in a situation where they had to react to whatever the other person was saying. To top it off, we had great people playing their parts. Bianca, Kerri, Dylan and Raphael worked really well improvising together. Dylan and Bianca created the scene well and gave insights to how the character’s personality should be and we started shooting. Kerri and Raphael adapted well to their given personalities.

I learnt that even improvising can help come up with more creative ideas rather than brainstorming and imagining scenarios and putting it into a script. The dialogues seem more natural and so did the acting. To sum up my ramble, Team STeve came in to the shoot with a rough idea of Bianca’s Mockumentary (thanks to the mock shoots we did in the past weeks) and started adding more personality to each character (following Dylan’s sitcom characters) and improvised the filler shots for the mockumentary.

me setting up the camera and framing up Bianca’s scene (that struggle… okay not really)

My part was the camera work. I was constantly thinking of ways to shoot a mockumentary. Dylan helped me quite a lot as he would give suggestions on how to shoot and which angle was probably best to get the right framing. I decided to go “spy mode” camera. I hid behind a wall and filmed most of the group shots in the kitchen. It was interesting way of shooting because it’s like the camera person is suppose to sneakily film their problematic situations in the share house.

Click here to see our location shoots.

This week was consultation session with Stayci. We had finished our sitcom test and the mockumentary mock shoot tests. We screened them for Stayci to watch and she said we were on track. (go team STeve!) We discussed our plan for our final shoot, the prototype. Dylan and I were the only ones present so we decided that we would go for a trailer as our prototype. Which genre? We still have not decided but hopefully our final shoot will tell us which one.

On Thursday, it was the Sony z7 crash course with Paul. I found some of the functions confusing as we could not find them on the camera. (Those buttons are always hiding in the weirdest places! Plus it was too early in the morning to process things). I always had to look around and observe the others. Wise words I learnt from my father, “observe and learn, don’t just sit there and do nothing”. Besides, I didn’t want to ask the same questions the others are asking!

After the crash course, we were planning on more doing more mock shoots in uni but Raphael could not make it to class that day. Instead, we sat down and started planning our shoot for week 11 shoot at Bianca’s share house. We decided to complete the final two genres – drama and slasher horror. We arranged to meet up at 12.30pm at Melbourne Central on Monday to travel together to Bianca’s place.

Week 9 has arrived! Our first location shoot! We travelled to North Carlton where Dylan was house sitting for his uncle. We shot our first genre on location – sitcom. We used our group members as casts:

1. Kerri – Alice

2. Dylan – Chris

3. Bianca – Chris’ Mum / Landlord

4. Raphael – Don

We had a 30 second worth of sitcom at the end of the day. We edited on the spot, with the laughter and applause sound effects in it as well. It was a fast edit. We were quite happy with our first location shoot. I was in charge of the camera and the audio. Dylan’s boom mic was surprisingly light.

On Thursday, we had an Audio crash course. PART 2. This time we learnt to attach it to the camera and how to gauge the audio levels. One interesting fact I learnt from that crash course, was that we should have the second channel (the right side) slightly lower compared to the first channel (left side) so that in case it peaks, the second channel will compensate for the feedback caused by the peak. Therefore, in the camera, we had to set the level lower than the left side. In theory, I roughly understood what was happening but I still think I should test it out to understand the concept better. I am quite tempted to go out and shoot with these equipment just to experiment and practice these gears. Paul mentioned it would be resourceful to learn how to use these equipment before going out to work. I really enjoy technical work as I am not the best in script writing as well as acting. (I have a fear of looking straight into the barrel…) Anyways, hopefully I get to practice with these equipment in the future.

This week’s collaboration studio class we were given a workshop on audio. We were given the opportunity to get our hands on those audio mixers. Paul ran through the things we need to look out for like how the difference of speech still needs to hit the 0 dB mark. If you’re whispering or shouting, they should be in the same level. I never knew about it formally but I would say it’s automatic to make sure you’re able to hear what the actor is whispering about. For example, if you’re recording sound, when someone whispers, naturally you’d just bump up the volume to capture the sound. Hearing that this is a must and the proper technique of recording sound does make you more conscious of it when you capture the sound.

Besides that, we spent most of our time doing a mock shoot for our group assignment. Paul’s advice during consultation was to use the time during class to do a shoot of two scenes of different genres. We agreed on Bianca’s “mockumentary” and Dylan’s “multicam sitcom”. The minute we started shooting, we had a few things to add to the script. Each take we added a new element into it. For Bianca’s mockumentary:

1. Just read the script as it is.

2. Add the unstable cameraman – because he is just a roommate.

3. Add off-screen voices to show that they’re still in the room where the roommates are still roaming around.

4. Just to refine the off-screen takes and actions (e.g. Bianca (the mother) standing up away from the film.

For Dylan’s sitcom:

1. We played with different angles.

2. We noticed trouble with continuity since it was a multi-cam and we only had one camera.

 Check my ‘mock shoots‘ blog post for the snippets of these elements we took into consideration.

I had suggestions, for the mockumentary, of adding like an unstable shot of them talking in the kitchen like a filler shot to show the ways they usually interact. But we were not shooting on location so I decided to leave that out. Monday will be another shoot so maybe I’ll try to incorporate that. However, the mock shoot was proven to be very useful. It saved us the time to find out mistakes and how to create a more interesting shot by adding more interesting elements to the shots. Now is the editing part. The editing should help come up with more creative style of shooting.