11 – TO KNOW YOUR PLACE

I have made mistakes before in assignments and class. There were days when I would forget an important item, or miscalculate an answer, but in this type of classwork to make a mistake is to jeopardize  an entire project. To create a film you need all the elements to work together. You need the audio and visuals to sync up, you need the lighting to be consistent, and you need the content to be cohesive. You need all of these individual parts to be taken as seriously as the next and you need to be on your A game the entire time. This semester I made the mistake of misjudging how to handle our talent and in the end our content has suffered from it. On our last shoot with Terri we were given an hour or so of quietness to record as much b-roll as possible. We needed something exciting, and we needed something genuinely fun. In my mind I had thought if I were able to have fun with her that the b-roll would be able to shoot itself. My mentality was that if I could just leave the camera rolling and play around with her that something would happen that could push this film forward. But looking back on our rushes I know that this was not the way we should have went. It goes without saying that being professional on set is the best way to approach most situations, and I broke that. I was sloppy and mistook my intention way too far. In then end our audio was the thing that suffered the most in this last rush of footage. Mosts shots would have me or my group-mates talking with or over Terri, and others were completely unusable because of our laughter. I’m not saying my group have done anything wrong. I was the senior student on set and the majority of them were looking to me for guidance, but the problem with that was that I didn’t have a proper structure down or guideline for myself on how to approach this type of recording. I didn’t know what type of b-roll I needed, only that I wanted as much of it as I could get, and again that’s where I suffer when professionals flourish. They know what type of image looks good, they know how to couple a similar shot to one they already had. I just had a camera and some vague ideas, and tried to force the image to come naturally rather than asking for a specific image. This part of the journey has been the most enlightening of them all. I know we’ve had some bumps in this figurative road, but this made me realise that I am a student for a reason. I am here to learn and to grow and understand that there is still much to know before I can call it perfect. At the time I was in that rush of trying to get everything together in my head and make things just magically happen, but now I know better and now I know that sometimes you do need to be that person that just goes in and gets hit done the way they want it to be done.