Notes to take away from the last shoots and moving towards final goals for this semester.

• Paul said it a thousand times – make audio a high priority
  • Getting into the editing suits has reiterated just how important audio is. Looking specifically at this if I isolated just the DSLR footage, the pull focus is often out or the camera jumps around a lot (in essence you couldn’t just play that footage through with not cuts). Clean audio allows us to SO much room for movement when editing. If a shot looks bad, you can simply discard it and not have to worry about synchronisation. Good audio creates a layer of security incase something else goes wrong.
• Get it right the first time
  • Sticking with audio, at the end of our shoot Nicolette made a comment about the discussion of Hamish and Ted in her first experiment being more natural and subsequently having better content. The second time around, when we got audible sound, the two were simply repeating what they had previously told us, and whilst this was good, its not the most ideal situation as it creates something that seems perhaps rehearsed. Obviously this isn’t always unavoidable, but trying to get it right the first time, especially when working with subjects who have limited time, is paramount to us defining our own form of video portraits. This is the omission (when possible) of the sentence “we’ll do that next shoot”, which barricades us into the domains of restricting not only ourselves as filmmakers, but our subjects as true representatives of themselves.
• Try to remove a variable
  • As I begin to edit I have noticed a jarring difference between the quality and basic composition decisions between the x200 footage and the DSLR footage. I think that the two camera can work in accordance with each other, though this is something we need to explore further. For instance the stabilised footage from the x200 perhaps contracts itself too much from the dslr footage. We could perhaps have the x200 moving around slightly, though staying within the same framing and position, to give it a sense of hand held effect. Alternatively we could try and stabilise the image portrayed on the dslr. This is something that we should address during the shoot, which perhaps could be achieved by having two exterior monitors to keep surveillance on the shoot and to ensure that the compositions are complimentary of one another. If this is unachievable (not sure if a monitor can be used with my dslr), more communication between myself and Nicolette on coverage and the contents of our frames should assists.
• Clapperboard
  • To make life easier for the editor, when shooting simultaneously with two separate cameras I think we need to use a clapperboard or have some kind of like image to sync the separate images together once editing. Of course it is possible without, but I think that this would simply be a good time saving factor to ensure that the audio and visuals match up across all the mediums we are using to record. I think that this is just a small organisation thing that could improve our process.

More to come I’m sure.