REFLECTION 2 – SET AND DON’T FORGET

A.B.C

Always Be Careful? Considerate? Cautious?

I’m not sure if that’s what it stands for, but it is something I will be considering when operating a camera now. To me it stands for Always Be Conscious, which doesn’t really work, however in this reflection it works perfectly.

For too long I would turn on a camera, change the settings to my liking, and just press record. In the end my rushes would come back inconsistent, with only the first few minutes of a take looking like what I had intended. The rest would end up looking too messy for my liking and after Robin’s speech about how we should always be making decisions while filming I realise that it was because I had fallen into the terrible habit of Set and Forget. It’s the standard approach on would have when not actively operating a camera, and whenever I would do TV productions sometimes we could afford to have multiple people on standby for camera, so I would set the shot, focus and lock off the tripod so that it would be stationary the entire take. It was common in TV, but when you are working on a film that requires fluidity I failed to see the difference and have made mistakes in the past. I even succumbed to this during a few of the class group tasks that we have been given, not really being active in the actual filming of a take, but just letting the camera do its job and not changing or altering anything as we continued with a shot. It made for an internal conflict, especially when I would notice something was off half-way through a take. I didn’t have the confidence to interrupt and ask if everything was okay with audio or exposure, I just trusted in the settings that we had made at the beginning and hoped that I was just being paranoid. But now I think this another improvement that I need to make when creating and filming in the future. I want to become the active camera-person that Robin wants us to be. I want my work ethic to be constant, and not just happening at the beginning or end of a take.