In our workshop this week we were assigned a group exercise to familiarise ourselves with the Sony MC50 video camera. My group mates Riah and Isobel came up with the structure and concept for the video, based around the theme of “a survival guide to your first six weeks at University”, which we then filmed in and around Building 80.

We tried to go for a more light-hearted, comedic treatment of the subject rather than a straightforward question-answer format, and so we introduced the thumbs-up motif to serve as punctuation for each of our cut-away shots.

We ended up shooting way more footage than we could conceivably use in the finished edit, so I had to cut a lot of the best answers/shots which was disappointing, but overall I’m pretty happy with the result. The narrative ties together nicely when edited, and thanks to Riah’s great first answer I managed to make it clear that the video is about tips for surviving university without needing opening titles or narration.

The only real technical problems we encountered were that the lapel mic’s extension cord connection was a bit dodgy and left some pops and crackles on the audio track, and the automatic white balancing made the green background look different across shots. I should have used the camera’s inbuilt display to view back footage we’d shot and make sure it looked consistent, but we were so conscious of time that we shot everything in one take before moving on. When I use this camera and microphone set-up in the future I’ll make sure to tape the audio connection in place and input technical settings manually.

Another key learning I took from this exercise is to ensure there is ample clear space before and after each shot, because J-cuts are much easier when you have extra material either side of the cut. It ended up being OK in this instance, but in my Project Brief 3 I’ll make sure I keep the camera rolling as long as possible.

I also wish we had recorded more ambient sound to build atmosphere, but since that wasn’t really part of the exercise we didn’t worry too much about it. Overall, I give this exercise a thumbs up.