At this weekend, I shoot the exercise with Lisa and mona. We both shooting dialogues. I found the most important thing about dialogue is the shooting with different angles. Lisa shot three people’s dialogue, she kept shooting from different angles. For example, different people’s over shoulder, different people’s pov, different people’s face and back. Another important thing is when shooting dialogue, always remember keep the camera on the same level when shooting from different angles.

Mine is two people’s dialogue. In shot, I used panning. however I asked Pual for feedback, it turns out I didn’t pan well. Pual said there are two kinds of panning, first one is to pan optionally, the second one, two people are talking, pan when one is talking, and cut to the the other is listening, to show the audience the face of the listener, but we can still hear the one who is talking. About the panning in my exercise, when I saw the clip, I found it is like there isn’t enough time to watch when one of them is talking. I guess that’s why this is a bad pan. You need to give the audience a second to catch up.

About editing, I did two different visions. When I was editing, I tried to let the one talk first, then cut quickly to another who’s replying, then cut back again, after that, cut again to the other, just like this, cut forth and back, it comes out the same problem as above, there is not enough time to catch up for audience, it’s pretty strange and uncomfortable to watch. So guess this kind of cut is more suitable for long conversation not for this kind of short, ‘few sentences’ conversation.

In my shoot, one of them getting up to get some drink from the machine, in my two visions, camera just moved slightly, following Lisa. Pual asked me if there is a better way to cover this scene. Then he showed me two examples which spark me. One is I can have a wide shoot from side, a different angle, contains two girls both in the frame. Second, I can pan the camera with the frame where Lisa is on the most left side, then pan camera back with the frame where both of them are in. Both of these two are better than what I shoot. When it is hard to imagine, I can also draw some pictures to help thinking.