Shooting the individual exercise 2 was really a comedy of errors in many ways.
I had intended to film on the Wednesday morning, with equipment already booked and a subject organised to film with. This did not go through as planned though, with my work calling me in for that morning and preventing me from getting to uni until just before class. That then left me the Friday to film.
I wanted to film outdoors in one of the comfortable areas at RMIT. With the construction going on and all of the preparations for the open day on Sunday, this proved to be quite difficult. The only area I could found that we wouldn’t be interrupted by sirens, the beeping of trucks or anything else was one of the courtyard areas surrounding the old jail.
Alaine and I immediately noticed the large heating unit sticking out of one the buildings, which produced a fair amount of noise. I don’t know what made me stick to the location after this, but some sense of hubris left me thinking that it would be at an appropriate enough level that I could edit it out in post. Although I could get rid of some of it, it was still extremely noticeable in the final product.
Sound seemed to be the major issue for me in this task. I had set everything up on the camera pretty easily and was quite thorough in double checking everything and changing things if need be, but it seemed to take me quite some time to even get the microphone working (I had forgotten to set the phantom power to 48k). I checked out the levels of the background noise on the camera and thought that it was manageable, which it would have been had the wind not had picked up during the shoot. Large gusts of wind overpower the sound multiple times in the short video, which was disappointing to say the least.
One thing that I struggled with for this task was the requirement to be the camera operator, as I chose a subject that required me to actively take a role in interviewing her. This is reflected in the end product as well, as the mutual friend of ours who is also in the shot does not have a role in the video beyond making Kelcey feel comfortable. If I had not have intervened though, the style of the interview would have been far more formal than what I intended, so the camera operation during the interview took a back seat and there was no variety in the shots at all.
I am beginning to become much more comfortable with using the equipment, but working with the conditions that were pushed on me by a lack of time in some sense really hurt the outcome of this task. I understand that filming outdoors was a decision I made though, so I think I will have to be far more selective with locations in the future.
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