Reflection
1. Reporting
An issue we ran into while filming our sketches came from our ability (or inability) to film smooth shots of the bottle opener. We needed to film shots that looked professional – the kind you see at the beginning of higher end online review videos – and found it trickier than first anticipated. We needed to find a way to make this happen so that the shots weren’t too jumpy or unclear.
2. Relating
We recognised that we needed something to balance the camera on rather than relying on our own hands for smooth shooting. Naturally, there are implications with hand held video and one of these is shakiness, and knowing this we set up a make-shift ‘dolly’ out of items we could find in the room and shot the bottle opener using this technique. This stems from practice we’ve used before, only where in the past we have had something more professional at our hands such as a tripod or an actual dolly, this time we made do with what we had and tried our best to replicate this practise with the resources we had.
3. Reasoning
As I said above, we recognised that the problem stemmed from our own incapabilities to hold/move the camera in a way that replicated the smooth shots shown in the video review we were studying. It was important to recognise that this was the problem, as then we were able to jump straight to a solution of not relying on hand held techniques, rather than pushing this further and trying to stabilise our own movements. Perhaps a more knowledgable/experienced person may have jumped straight to using a ‘dolly’ or dolly-type instrument first rather than attempting to film by hand at all, however in reality it is such a small issue that really there isn’t a lot to consider here in terms of differing perspectives or ethics/theory.
4. Reconstructing
The only thing I can really say about learning from this for future practice is that planning ahead can save time. If we had put more time into considering what we were shooting then we might have figured out ahead of time that we would need some kind of tool to film these specific shots. We could have looked at the case study and thought about how the creator of this video probably went about getting the more professional looking shots that he used, and what options we might have in reconstructing this. If we had done this rather than jumping right in to filming, we might have had a better set up and saved some time in filming and sorting in post-produciton. With this said, the shots we ended up with were what what we were after, and so maybe there is something to be said for improvising and drawing on past experience/knowledge on the spot. Our ‘dolly’ may not have been professional or even all that functional, but it did the job for this shoot!
