Week 4 Tuesday Reflection

We started the class by getting a lesson in using the mic. It was pretty simple, and mainly involved plugging it in and setting the camera’s recording to the external microphone.

Next, we were given a script and were asked to film it, with quite a lot of freedom in how we approached it. I decided that today was my time to be a director, so I took the chance.

I started by planning out the shots on a piece of paper. The plan was to get them ready in advance so we’d be able to knock them off more quickly once we got started. This plan did end up working and we were able to be efficient when we needed to. I also wanted to avoid the pitfall of choosing shots just to aptly cover the story, which I found my group ended up doing in an earlier exercise.

(I’ve added the numbers and arrows for reference, but they weren’t in the original sketch.)

I decided upon the shots based on the script. The first shot I thought of that I wanted to do was the close up of the two faces (2). I then thought that we really should start with a wide establishing shot, so I put that in (1). I thought it’d be best to work out what the establishing shot would look like based on our location, so I didn’t put much thought into drawing it out. I thought it made a lot of sense to finish on just the man sitting in the corner of a wide frame, showing his isolation in the context of the room, so I put that in at the end (6). I also liked the idea of having a bit of a pan/tilt to follow the man when he gets up, and having him swap positions in the frame with the woman (3). For the remaining shots (4 and 5), I chose shots which could convey what was intended in the script.

I was happy with the look of the side-on close up of the two faces. The focus moves from the female character to the male character, which was meant to signal a shift in the attention of the audience in that direction. While we were trying to get the shot, we found it hard to get one face in focus and not the other (we were finding it hard to get a shallow enough depth of field). After watching the shot back on a bigger screen, I can see that we were successful in getting focus on one face at a time. My worries probably came from the shortcomings of the small viewfinder screen making it unclear what was in and out of focus from where I was standing.

Using the chart we received in an earlier session and the notes we took on the f stop and focal lengths, I can confirm that our depth of field was roughly 9 inches, which was definitely shallow enough to get each face in focus separately, although it wouldn’t have been shallow enough if I only wanted part of one of the character’s faces in focus. I could have done this if the camera was much closer to the actors.

Towards the end of our shoot, we found ourselves in a bit of a rush. I decided to cut a long shot that would have been the second last shot (5), to avoid lining up two long shots in a row. I think this was a fine decision given the time constraints, but we could have also made this shot work if we’d thought about it a bit more.

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