Over the weekend I went out and shot my first proposed task. Overall I’m extremely happy with the outcome of the whole exercise as I was a bit nervous that I was going to walk away from it having gained no knew knowledge however this anxiety proved to be futile.
My aim for this task was to shoot the same action, of a person rummaging through various bags, with two different types of camera motions in order to emote two separate tones. I think I was somewhat successful in relation to this as I feel that I have ended up with two pieces that alter the positioning/perspective of the audience, however looking back I wish I did alter the lighting between each piece as opposed to relying on motion to affect the story.
With the first shot I attempted to establish the camera as a character itself, almost like an animal stalking its prey. Through this technique I wanted to almost perpetrate the character as being someone with questionable intentions by distancing the audience from the actor giving of an air like they are spying on them. Limitations for the shot included the fact that I didn’t have a track which was particularly troublesome seeing as though it was a tracking shot, so I made do by wheeling the camera on a chair. Secondly, the original room I intended to film in was unavailable resulting in a last minute location change which drastically limited the distance to which I could snake the camera around the central figure.
Reflecting on the product, I really feel happy that for myself I achieved the tone I wanted to. Using a chair obviously made the movement of the shot a lot less smooth jumpier, fortuitously I feel like this only enhanced the effect of shaping the camera as a beast creeping upon a scene. I do however feel like this was broken when the camera moves closer to the subject. While the location was much harder for me to work with I think it only forced me to perform a more sophisticated camera movement than originally intended. Overall I was very pleased with the results of this shot.
Moving on to the second shot, by having the camera closely following the actor I intended to shift the focus of the audience, as I attempted to try bring them along with the plight of the character as opposed to watching from afar. By also making this a hand held shot I wanted to increase the freneticism of it, hopefully making the audience more inclined to be more on board with the subjects panic. I originally also planned to feature the actor’s face much more in this shot in order to further enlighten the character’s psychological state, however this didn’t come across as originally planned.
My biggest issue here was my disability to pull focus as I was working alone, which in the end stopped me from shifting focus to the character’s face as I struggled to do so on my own. This greatly impacted the final product as I was technically unable to achieve what I intended to and ended up with a second clip that didn’t do too much in the way of presenting the character in a new light, she remains mysterious as the first shot.
From all this I want to shoot something next week which will include me working on all my issues and interests that arose from this shoot including:
- Using a track to improve a smooth tracking shot.
- Research into the relationship between Production Design and camera work.
- More interesting experimentation with exposure in order to explore its tonal impact.
- Having people to come along on the shoot in order to include focus pulls.
- Have the requirement that I must produce an edited piece with multiple camera setups in order to avoid repeats of the same techniques.