Returning to the Lumière brothers is an incredibly worthy exploration. Having first properly studied their work in the earlier stages of first year, to review their actualities is a treat. I now feel I have a greater appreciation for what they captured in their short snippets of life and in particular their framing and shot composition.

After completing our own task of capturing ‘actualities’ regardless of the years and technological developments between our work and the Lumière’s some links were evident. Most noticeably the way, in which action is framed, in the Lumiere brother’s instance they were trailblazers. In our instance we are trained content producers aware of film theory. Viewing the Lumière’s clips just after capturing our own revealed our fantastic their composition and layer of a frame was. Considering they were the first filmmakers they used both line and balance to fantastic effect. What was also intriguing was that although separated by a great number of years our clips shared trams, busy streets and the unavoidable pedestrians glancing at the camera. Even in 2015 people still find camera’s intriguing and their behaviour changes when realising its presence. Surely by now people are more desensitised to cameras, everyone carries one in their pocket and I’m sure we’re monitored to some extent by CCTV cameras. Why should a camera sitting on a tripod make us feel any more uncomfortable?

At the end of the day I believe that the Lumière brothers did a fantastic job of Exercise 1A (on a number of occasions). The clip below reveals how even in the earliest days of film directors were intent upon capturing the best shot even if it meant weeks between takes.

 

Recording Audio

Although it has been a while the return of the Zoom recorder is a welcome one. This time it is nice to be using the technology with a greater appreciation of the role that it plays in production and understanding the importance of having a separate and well-recorded audio track. Obviously during this exercise we weren’t all that serious in our approach but I feel that we were still able to capture some good quality recordings. Whilst recording in building 12 (The Hub) we found it was incredibly difficult to get a good signal to noise ratio. There was an excessive amount of background noise mostly due to the hum of a lot of computers. As we progressed through the exercise we noticed this and decided to shift out focus from the open area and moved to the stairwell. In a fairly rudimentary and amateur way we attempted to mix in a live setting, playing with the placement of the Zoom recorder. The skills associated with sound recording for film is something I’m eager to explore this semester as poor audio can be quite frustrating when watching amateur short films. It is for this reason that audio has always been something that has cause me to be somewhat apprehensive when filming.