Survival // Week Five Workshop

Being presented with a new piece of equipment to work with to me is like being an excited kid in a candy store; so many possibilities! What features are there? Does it work as well as other equipment I’ve used before? Is it easy to use? What does this button do?

Using the Sony MC50 seemed exciting, but ultimately I left the Week 5 workshop a little flustered and disappointed with the camera. While the controls and setting were great – this was my first time working with a camera that had a ‘white balance’ option that I knew how to use, and it made getting a decent colour that wasn’t washed out blue, or a really jarring looking yellow/orange, pretty easy. But beyond that, reviewing the footage we took for the week’s exercise, the picture quality seems pretty awful. I’m hoping that when I work with it the next time round I manage to perfect it so the image is a lot crisper. I’m used to working with my Nikon D5300 to film (though I know it isn’t exactly the best camera for filming) and the image quality has always been excellent. I’m also used to working with my Rode microphone (I can’t recall what model exactly), which I prefer over the microphone attached to the MC50 (which I believe is still Rode, anyway). The workshop exercise left me feeling less than optimistic about the possibilities with this camera, though I’ve booked to use it for my filming on Thursday for PB3 as part of the technical requirements. I think I’ll be bringing along my Nikon just for good measure.

The exercise in itself was fun – work as a group to create a short clip on how to survive the first six weeks of university. My group decided to focus on what not to do, in order to remain in good favour with the rest of the students that attend RMIT. Our vision was to create a humorous video that would be entertaining as well as informative; our main hope was that people might stop using the escalator to get from level 2 to level 3 so that we could stop being late for class. As of the time I write this blog post, the editing is still in the works.

On the bright side, I think I’ve finally got my head around using Premiere. One thing mastered (if you can call it that), many more to go.