Recently Paul suggested that maybe I ought to think about what else I want out of this course, because ultimately this studio is about investigating through making – the ultimate goal is not to create something perfect for a show reel, but to research and develop my methodologies of working (as this post title might suggest).

At the moment, I think that my favourite type of research has been looking at how the directors (of films I like to watch), actually go about creating and covering their scenes. However, I do actually want to make a scene this semester…

My original thought was that I wanted to use some of my friend’s scripts as the basis for my work. So maybe I can incorporate both of these things – the theoretical and the practical.

Maybe I can use the same kind of scenes – one from a prose and one from a script and do different exercises (like the ones we’ve been doing in class) and then work out from there, which shooting method works best for me.

In order to do this I would like to refine my technical skills (camera, audio and lighting), because I am still not entirely confident with the equipment at hand. I believe that even if I’m not going to be actually controlling the camera, audio or lighting for my shoots, I still need to have an understanding of how everything works. This way I know the constraints that the equipment poses and how I can, I guess, exploit the equipment to create the best possible results. These technical processes will not be the main concentration of my work for the rest of the semester, but I still think it would be worth having classes assigned to furthering our skills in DOPing, audio and lighting. Ultimately, without learning how to use these ‘tools’ we have no way of realising our ideas.