Week 6 of FIlm Light was quite busy,  but it contained one of my favourite exercises to date! Unfortunately (again), I wasn’t able to make it into class on Tuesday, due to a sustained ankle injury that left me bedridden. But I rested it right up and ready for Thursday, where I was ready to make up for it and then some. Unfortunately (seemingly becoming my catchphrase), I had to leave early, but Thursday was all about exercise 6!

From an initial glance, exercise 6 is just like every other we have been assigned in Film Light, vague scripts, basic named characters and a set time limit. But to me, this was different.  Exercise 6  had two groups capture both visuals and audio of a scene over 3 shots. However, there was a twist! Whilst the main wide and one close up mid-shot could be filmed in the same location, the other characters mid-shot had to be shot somewhere else, and we as a crew had to use lighting and camera tricks to make the scene itself as believable as possible.

This excited me for a few reasons. For one, I hadn’t been in class for a while, so it was nice to see and work with my fellow classmates, but the main intrigue of the task was how the twist was going to make us all have to recall all the skills we had previously attained throughout the course to make this location switch work, which was both terrifying and thrilling.

Tash had a great potential location, so we all went down and scouted outside the Streat cafe, with the brick walls on the buildings opposite being an easy thing to replicate.

The crew brought a little bit of everything, and whilst we never got the chance/needed to use the c-stands or shot bags, we felt safer with them. I assumed the role of first assistant director, and basically ensured that everyone understood what Tash wanted to be done, as well as cracked down on packing-up time.

The shoot itself went really well, we had enough people that everyone had a role to play in some capacity, and no one was left completely without a job. We played around with depth of field and eyelines to cheat the location, and whilst I haven’t fully analysed the footage as of yet, my initial scrub through looks as if it works. However, we kind of forgot to be conscious of the lighting, which in a lighting studio, is pretty funny.

I am going to have an edit up on my Mediafactory blog once it’s done within the next few days, but I am excited to see how it turns out! Never the less, I had so much fun working on this exercise, and hope for more like this in the future!