14/05/24: When looking back on our exercise around the table, Robin essentially wasn’t pleased with our group’s cinematography as we’d breached the 180-degree rule numerous times, making our edits feel quite disorienting. I understand Robin’s position, however, I do feel that our edits weren’t that disorienting; Of course, that is biased to say from me. In regards to cinematography, when we read that Madeline (my character) had to be favoured in a two-shot with Barry (Austin), Ewan interpreted that as my face occupying the space in the frame as Barry was in the background. Regardless, we ended up reshooting the scene under Kevin’s direction; the group decided to retain the same casting, in addition to Ewan as Rog, because we were already familiar with the lines and the subtext. Contrary to the other group who interpreted the subtext as two sassy members dominating over a passive Gilda.
One thing that was most memorable in that class was the sensor comparison between two cameras. Using a 50mm lens/preset, Robin explained that the larger the sensor, the bigger your field of view was going to be; he also prefaced that the depth of field WAS NOT A FACTOR FOR FIELD OF VIEW: and that it was solely Aperture, focal length, exposure.
17/05/24: We looked at the videos from Tuesday’s exercise and our group felt more proud as it gave people fewer headaches than the last time when we kept jumping over the 180-degree line like it was a skipping rope, which was prominent in our edits that told the same story with a variation in portrayal. The other group however repeated our mistake from the first attempt and disoriented the people viewing the videos with Coco’s close-up shot. After watching those edits, I got a better understanding of Robin’s viewpoint when we made that same mistake, not that the bias was removed. It did seem like their edits were very limited due to the lack of coverage that they had, and that’s my general rule of thumb, which is to get as much good coverage as possible as it makes the editing process much easier.
This led to a series of videos being showcased by Robin once again explaining the different ways in which ensemble scenes were shot, one of the techniques was simply grouping people within the frame based on what side of the table they were on, removing the necessity of having to shoot individual close-ups from all 5 characters seated at the table.
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