A rather uncreative title for this blog post aside, I’ve had a few moments of reflection in the past few weeks when it comes to filming and this course and all of that. Firstly, I think I’d like to discuss accidents and like accidents in filming or like, unintended moments in filming. Last night, I went to the Ocean Party show at Howler, a band that have a very special place in my heart and following the passing of a dear friend of mine who was in the band, they are doing a final series of farewell shows as they move on from the band into other ventures, so as to respect Zac’s legacy

And some moments happened during the show which I felt obliged to film, which are featured in this embedded instagram post, the second one, of my friend Stef glimmering in this neon yellow light that is just so wonderful, singing along to a song, and it looks great merely because she’s standing in the right place at the right time and I’m standing in the right place at the right time to be filming it. I guess this isn’t as unintended insofar as it is a happenstance coincidence, but it was a nice moment to capture. But then when the Ocean Party started playing, their song Head Down has a very wonderful saxophone outro and I knew I had to film Liam as he started to play it, but then my iPhone Camera completely, unintentionally and through no fault of my own decided to get out of focus completely as he begins to start playing the sax, and it looks quite good. I feel like unintended moments like these really suit what Small Things can lead towards, in that we all could start to, as we capture more footage and begin to shoot these mini-projects laden with constraints, more unintended moments could pop up, and I reckon they’re nice ways to shoot beyond this static, optimal resolution optimal quality, static content that is starting to pop up more and more.

It might be something I try to explore as well when I go to more of these shows next weekend, as each show I’ve been to has been equal parts beautiful, sad, enjoyable, a wholly emotional experience.

View this post on Instagram

these bands are so special to me and you beauty

A post shared by @ dodgem.car on Mar 23, 2019 at 8:59am PDT

Secondly, I’ve been thinking about Christian Marclay’s The Clock and something my friend mentioned the other day as the perfect embodiments of the application of constraints in film. My friend mentioned that they’d be compiling a list of movies that they’d watched that featured scenes of people brushing their teeth as these films were intimate in their nature as you only brush your teeth in front of people you loved, and I think both of these filmic constraints, at least in the edit suites are really interesting premises to consider. It is truly unbelievable and imcomprehensible that someone was about to create a 24hr film that is a watch, using shots/scenes from movies in the past and I think there really is a place for these filmic constraints to be explored. I think for me, if it was to try to scour films for something I might bring myself back to my commerce degree roots in the marketing sector and I would want to find all the Coca Cola featuring scenes in films. Might take me the rest of my life though, but it’s about the taste.

Any epiphany that I’ve really been tackling since the realisation that it was taking place is just how much my film making practice if we’re going to call it that, lacks in any proper technical facets so far. So it has been quite eye opening to confront this at this point in this studio, and realise just how far I have to improve in this respect. 

I guess the lack of professionalism stems from an amount of having not really needed to film things professionally but if I was to be honest to myself in this circumstance, I think it’s undeniable that I should apply a level of professionalism more in general to all of these scenarios, and this was even mentioned in class. That is, when it was mentioned that our phone usage while shooting at university, it really made me realise there’s some facets of our filming even just in these exercises in class that could be tweaked only so slightly to be wholly more considered and professional.

That said, another level of a lack of professionalism, and a major layer of lessons to be learned occurred in the last week, in our class exercise for Lenny, when we as a group, after having filmed, mistakenly did not export the proper amount of files from the card of the camera, meaning that what we had filmed was in the end lost. This of course is extremely unfortunate, as I would’ve liked to edit my own Lenny footage that I was a part of filming but it is certainly part of the process of all the things I need to be considering more when it comes to filming projects from now on. In lieu of this, I edited the footage that we had been editing in a previous class, the pre-filmed Lenny footage, and found it quite enthralling to use the hot-keys that had been provided as well as being afforded the luxurious thought of doing the “harder cut” after drafting the edit together. 

When filming my making the bed exercise the other night, I discovered something I must admit is quite unfortunate in the facet that, regardless of how good or bad DSLR’s are for filming video, I don’t really even know how to use it properly or to use the video function to the best of its ability. I realised this due to the work we’ve been doing in class trying to work out how to use the Sony cameras, and how we’re being shown all the different layers that we what the camera’s shot to look like before we even think about filming the shot. 

But tonight, I kind of had to take the L (“the loss”), and just go forth with it, and I felt the result was more or less pretty cool. Without a tripod for a DSLR, there are pretty limited positions any one person can fix onto their room to film their bed, but I felt the view’s I was able to manufacture were quite good, though at the time I was listening to music on my laptop, so the sound in the clip is completely different to the sound that is in the original source material. I recently purchased a Zoom H4n to bootleg more concerts I attend, but also knowing it would be a great device to have for filmmaking I used it to record myself, once again making my bed this morning. That in itself I guess is pretty neat, because it means in the video it is a capture of two times I’ve made the bed, once via video and once via audio. It was a nice touch as well for the sound to clip, as I’d landed on the bed in the video, I felt at least.

I also hope it is okay with Paul to be using a DSLR; I really don’t know but don’t think it fully would be.

The reason I signed up to do this studio stems from my conception that, in my third year, whilst gaining experience and/or learning different ways to approach media and explore my creative process – I’ve done work related to documentary, live tv, non-fiction film, as well as the work I’ve been able to do for Triple R until this point – I kind of got lost in this and feel a bit lacking in the extent to which I fully grasp, the smaller, more technical fundamentals of film. 

I would posit that so far I’ve missed out on fully conceiving these fundamentals, and I thought that this studio would help me reconcile this, and so far I feel like my thoughts in this respect have been vindicated as this studio is really enabling, or activating my duty to do this. The studio prompt invites us to investigate our filmmaking praxis through prompts and constraints, and I would say this is infact the aim that I am desiring from this course. That is, through prompts and constraints that will avoid me getting bogged down at this point or during the semester in the more creative more illustrative nature of film, I can spend more time in this studio focusing on improving my understanding of all the fundamentals as I make sure I consolidate my creative praxis from the ground up. In a way I think this cuts the fat, and allows one to focus more on the film theory that Jean Epstein advocated for in photogenie, as there is going to be less of a focus on the story, and more emphasis and the enhancement of moments through film, in a way as well. 

I’m really looking forward to exploring how I can consolidate my media making practice as this semester progresses. Though I should really start being more punctual to class.