This semester in Deliberate film was definitely that of an odd one, to say the least.

However I have zero complaints. This semester having been forced to adapt to a solely online work environment I was very skeptical in terms of producing ‘film’ work. The most difficult obstacle, but surprisingly the most beneficial was the constant problem solving. There was a lot of trial and error this semester, but regardless of the number of experiments I under went, the most important thing I learned from this was to always be “Deliberate”. That’s not to say I didn’t bump into some happy accidents occasionally in the edit suite, but it means to always plan thoroughly and efficiently so that you don’t rock up to a set (or zoom call) unprepared and unsure as to what you want as a director.

Above you’ll see a cut from a final scene of a short that we shot this semester via Zoom. Although it’s not perfect, I’m quite happy with how it turned out given we literally couldn’t film together as a team and had to approach this remotely. Thanks to an awesome, cooperative team we trialed a number of different experiments to decide on what would essentially work the best given the conditions we had, and we put that in to practice.

The key areas we focused on implementing were what we’d primarily learnt in the tutorials such as 3-point lighting, sound design, matching eye-lines and most importantly pre-production. Having not written my own script before, I found that quite an exciting and creative process as well as a challenge to write a story which could be shot from an indoor perspective. And even more so, adapting another persons script into a short film. To do this, with the help of my team we constructed floor plans using our own spaces in combination with another members spaces to create the illusion of them as 1 space. This was overall a beneficial, enjoyable, and very well adapted studio given the tough circumstances and I look forward to putting all of what i’ve learnt into practice in the future!

Mitch Pelns Ross