Single shot video, as known as a filming technique called ‘Long-take’ (from Wikipedia), that used an extremely long continuous shot as a more interesting way to tell the story, and alternative way than ‘editing’ that need more accurate planning, numerous time of rehearsal before that shot is actually being shot.
Before the exercise, Brian had provided us 2 different ways for planning a Single shot clip shooting, the floor plan and storyboard (the more common one). After reviewing the example, I guess floor plan is acting as a literal method of presenting the storyboard, list down all the narratives and dialogues of each scene. For storyboard, literally, a vital preparation of drawing down all scenes of the video we are going to make, as a reference when the clip had started shooting.
The topic of our first taste of single-shot was ‘Misunderstanding’, according to the brief, we guess the purpose of that little clip have to be creating the ‘Misunderstanding’ between us, the makers and our audiences; or just to present the ‘Misunderstanding’ between protagonists. By using a video that talks about the ‘Misunderstanding‘ between different gender, made by the Singaporean comedy Wah!Banana as the reference, we had decided to show the misunderstanding between characters instead of us and our viewers.
How to express our creativity though this short exercise? While drawing the storyboard, I was wondering if we could switch protagonists to the same sex, and if we could using another story to replace their main idea of proposing (Also because I’ll be quite awkward when in front of the camera). Our expected location was a Cafe on campus or the student lounge on Earl Street, however, since these places were full of students, we had chosen the common area of an Unilodge as our filming place.
While having the first rehearsal of the original ‘proposing’ story by using the single shot technique rather than shooting from different angles and perspectives, we had found some video game discs which could be our props to organize the totally distinct one than the story plot we used the video as a template, the ‘Misunderstanding’ between a game addicted girl and her friend, and I had become the cameraman for granted that took the heaviest (I guess?) responsibility.
Magnificent was started from kept practicing, and for me, the most interesting part in video shooting, having ridiculous blooper takes including the camera had been blocked by the actor’s back, inadvertently Corpsing (laughing while in shoot), could be valuable memories for us media operators (at least for me), although most of them were failures. By the way, since an officer was repairing the vending machine that had been a little distributed, and having too much rehearsal, we didn’t have enough time to let the shot being as perfect as it could be, such as I hadn’t focused on actor’s shoe when she was tying her shoelaces.
To create a misunderstanding between us and audiences, other than just protagonists themselves, I had tried to mute all dialogues, found a background soundtrack of cafe ambience to replace the original ambient sound from the exercise, and adjusted the Audio Pannel to compose them in coherent.