Week8 project development

 In this week, I finished the part 1of my split screen project. I went to the center of Melbourne, and shoot different symbolic sceneries, architectures of this city. Such as the graffito street in Melbourne, that is so interesting and artistic. In the shooting process, I found that is a little boring if I only shoot the graffito, so I tried to capture some movements cooperating with that artistic graffito. For instance, I captured one traveler who is taking the photo in the graffito street. In addition, I shoot the church near the finders square and the carriage in Swanson Street. Then I edit those things to three screens in one shot, so that they construct a space. For the church, I used different perspectives and position to shoot it. One is the low angel close up shoot for a part of it. Another is the wide shoot for the whole of it. And for the carriage, I have to say I am so lucky, because I fortunately capture a couple who taking one carriage passing by the camera. Indeed, they talk with camera. In order to show the life style of Melbourne, I went to the area of Yarra River, in here I shot the street artist, the people who relaxed on the grass, the people who are boating. Honestly, those shots are shoot without plan, I just got inspiration when I seeing it.

Actually, through this filming, I deeply realized that how important about the “time” for documentary. Even, I already have a storyboard for this part shooting, but in the real filming process, I still shoot lots of unexpected scenes. So, in documentary filming, we are inquired to capture the scenes accurately and quickly. For example, we should quickly confirm the suitable exposure and good composition when we found any good scene. I thought I got improvement in those aspects trough this shooting.

Week 8 epiphany

1. INTERVIEW

On today’s class, we watched numbers of interviews. When people mentioned documentary, they are easily relate to the interview. However, too many normal interviews will make viewers feel boring to watch. So using different ways to do an interview seems so significant in documentary. Robin showed so many clips on class to illuminate the different style of interview. Usually, in formal interview, the interviewee is looking at the camera or looking at the interviewer who might sit beside with camera. I think this normal style will make the interview straight, powerful and serious, especially used in biography documentary. In addition, sometimes, the interviewee and interviewer may sit together in the shot, they may talked like a friend. This style seems more relaxed than the first one, it is also usually used in television program I guess. In my opinion, I am prefer other one which is more interesting, the interviewer is following with the interviewee, and ask the concrete question when the interviewee doing something. This one is help viewers directly get involved in it. Actually, in broadcast media, we have done the similar one in our television program. We did a food theme program, which introduced Middle East food. In this program, we interviewed one chef during her cooking process, according her cooking step, we asked specific questions. This interview style not only makes audience know the theme more clearly, but also avoid the boring waiting time. If I do an interview in future, I’ll still choose this one.

Then we did a class exercise to shooting an interview documentary. I am a sound recorder. In our interview, we used a different shooting style. For example, the interviewee look at the camera, and we also used the over shoulder shot from the interviewer. But in our shooting process, our group didn’t filming systematically. I think we should consider how to improve cooperation in our future group exercise.