In this weeks class the discussion revolved around colour temperature and focal length. I really enjoy watching the clips and having Robin give his insight into what we watch. It is especially interesting when it helps you to understand an aspect of filming, like focal length a bit better. The two clips we were shown showcased differing focal lengths. The first clip was from Soy Cuba, which was amazing, as it was such a smooth continuous shot and made me feel like I was at that party, which is the benefit of shooting with a short focal length lens. The second clip was from We Still Kill The Old Way, which, because of the long focal length, made you feel like an observer to the scene, in a distant way. I feel like I’m getting better at determining what scenes feature long or short focal lengths, but I feel like when Robin quizzes the class about this, everyone is far too nervous to answer in case they are wrong and I’m not going to lie, I often am.
We were then tasked with doing a depth of field exercise, we decided to do it on Swanston Street near the tram stop, as it’s busy and would make for an interesting backdrop. Our first setup was to achieve the most depth of field possible, so we placed the camera not too far from our subject and zoomed the camera out, stopping it as far down as we could.
Then, in order to achieve shallower depth of field, we moved much further back and stopped the camera down, zoomed in and framed the shot to match the first as best we could, but with a noticeable depth of field change, as was required. These exercises are really good, as they allow me to refresh and reinforce my technical knowledge that I often seem to forget.
After this my group set up a C-stand and attached some core-board to it to explore all the different configurations that can be made. This is something I’ve done before, but it was fun to see what bizarre ways we could use the stand, it really is one of the most useful and versatile pieces of film equipment.