It’s week two and we’ve been split in two. Literally.

The Media and Screenwriting students have been separated, or at least, every now and then we will be. So for our first lesson as a Media collective, we also separated into two groups to work on the same exercise. That is, adapting a script that was written in the screenwriting workshops last week. We only focused on a certain scene that approximately went for 20-30 seconds. Our group worked within the confines of the classroom and the other group worked elsewhere.

Our group split into production roles with me being one of the two camera operators. We honestly didn’t have that much of a strict working method since we thought of the activity so casually and we were basically going with the flow. However, that’s not to say that we didn’t go through the scene a few times and talked about the shots that we were going to do, as well as how and in what order we would film them — because we did all of that before we actually started.

I guess it was during and after we filmed the scene that I realised how out of touch I was with production. The first sign of this was trying to remember how to use a camera such as the Sony X200 that we used, and doing the basics such as white balancing, and actually operating the camera. I suppose it served as a reminder, a much needed and well timed one since it’s still the beginning of the semester, of the common mistakes you could make if you weren’t really paying attention. One of mine being that I was looking at the screen like a passive consumer when “operating” the camera rather than actually positioning an eye to the viewfinder and really using the camera. So those are things for me to definitely think about the next time we do something like this.

The second lesson of the week, we were again split for most of the lesson and we went through what a web series was. We also had a class exercise where the we were tasked to film a scene that closely depicted a particular scene that I had filmed literally a year prior in the Translating Observations studio that I was in (check out this post), hence, I did take a backseat on the filming of this since most of the production roles were already taken. We were later joined by the Screenwriting students and discussed what we were going to do this semester. To make it a long story short (since it was a fairly long discussion), we’re all currently waiting to see if we will still be making serial type web series in the genre of drama or making a different form of web series such as an anthology.